New Rig

[FlyingPenguin]

That's a deal. I'll just warn you my cable dressing skills suck. Fortunately most of these new cases have channels for the cables that run underneath the back plate.

[Err]

That's a deal. I'll just warn you my cable dressing skills suck. Fortunately most of these new cases have channels for the cables that run underneath the back plate.

I'm the same way with cables. I tend to put them were they are convenient. I will tie any out of the way of fans and sharp metal bits of the case.

[Losbot]

That's a deal. I'll just warn you my cable dressing skills suck. Fortunately most of these new cases have channels for the cables that run underneath the back plate.

I'm sure I would enjoy a day or two away from the craziness of SoFla. I'd welcome a change of scenery and some peaceful PC tinkering, along with good booze.

[FlyingPenguin]

Bring your gun. I have a target range in the back 10 acres.

Seriously, any time man.

[psypher]

Bring your gun. I have a target range in the back 10 acres.

Seriously, any time man.

dam nice, your own target range.

btw, did you do a clean install or did you use Acronis to move you over to the new hardware?

[FlyingPenguin]

Yup. 20 acres. I have a big mound of dirt left over from when they built the road coming in here, and I use that as a back stop. Everyone shoots in their backyard around here.


Clean OS install. No way I want to clone 7 years worth of cruft in the old registry.

That's why this will take weeks. I use a variety of software, some of it very old, some of it rather arcane. Lots of background services, scripts being launched, data synchronization going on, and I'm very fussy about how my desktop is laid out and it's functionality.

I have a LONG checklist from the last time I did this that I spent days updating to include newer software and changes. Just going at it bit by bit.

The real pain is obsolete software. I either have to find a way to make it work, or buy an upgrade if available.

Whenever I'm comfortable with the new rig, I'll do a final data sync and swap it out.

[Losbot]

Bring your gun. I have a target range in the back 10 acres.

Seriously, any time man.

Ohhhh....now you're making this EVEN MORE appealing. I might have to start planning for a new rig already.
I can imagine the checklist already:

PC Components..........Check!
Whiskey/Bourbon.......Check!
Sig 516......................Check!
Sig P228....................Check!
Ruger LCP.................Check!
Lots of ammo.............Check!


LOL

[FlyingPenguin]

Well almost ready to swap out the old rig for the new one. Finished installing everything last night, got all the synchronizing and backup scripts setup and tested in Task Scheduler. Going to try to swap today since the wife comes back in town tomorrow (I've been cloistered in my office every free moment the past two weeks while she was gone, working on this).

Upgraded several programs to be sure they were 100% Win 8.1 compatible. Some were just freely available upgrades and some I had to purchase.

Had a major set back a couple of days ago. Something I installed apparently broke the Windows Installer. I think this is what also broke Acronis 2016. I think it had something to do with the Shadow Copy service. I didn't notice it for a full day because not all programs use the Windows Installer service for installation - I only noticed it when two programs that do use it (Serif video editor and iTunes) refused to install - they would just hang on the installation window. It also affected Windows Update.

Sadly, I could not figure out how to fix it or exactly what caused it. I suspect it was some old application installer that didn't play nice with Win 8.1, and maybe didn't like that I was running as a limited user with temporary admin permissions. I did realize at one point that Win8.1 doesn't like you activating the hidden administrator account and using that to elevate privileges. That actually breaks things because while elevated, Windows swaps the user registry to the admin's registry which is bizarre. WinXP didn't do that and I'm pretty sure Win7 didn't do that. I suspect that in Win 8 & 10 Microsoft actually deprecated the administrator account and doesn't ever expect you to use it. So instead I disabled it and just created a second user who was an admin just for elevating privileges of the limited user.

Since I couldn't fix the installer issue, I wound up having to roll back the boot drive to an Acronis image from the previous day that preceded the cause of the problem (just kept rolling back until I got to an image that would allow iTunes to install), and then I had to re-do all the work I had done that day. Not really a disaster since I take meticulous notes and from the checklist that was restored from the image, I knew exactly where I'd left off. But there's an excellent example of why you should image your drive often. I was imaging it several times a day while setting it up to cover my arse.

So after my morning coffee I'll swap it out. All I have to do is pull the GTX 760 out of the old rig and put it in the new one - the only piece of hardware I'm keeping from the old rig.

As I noted above, I'm running as a limited user on the new rig for security. It's been proven this mitigates most malware attacks. I could never do that on the old rig because some apps I had on it just wouldn't work properly as a limited user under Win7, so instead I was using DropMyRights to limit rights when running browsers and my Thunderbird email client. Sadly, DropMyRights doesn't work in Win8. That's another reason why I had to update a lot of software. Everything seems to play nice with a limited user and UAC nowadays. I'm just using that in conjunction with Window's built in Defender AV.

I must say, this new rig feels real snappy, and I do like the look and feel of Win8.1 (with Classic Shell installed of course). Also impressed with how Win 8.1 found most device drivers on it's own. Many of the manufacturers, like the one for my fingerprint reader, don't even have drivers posted for Win8 - they just tell you to plug it in and let Windows find the driver.

[FlyingPenguin]

Up and running. Just some little bit of fiddling with settings but it's essentially ready to go.

[FlyingPenguin]

I had to rip a dozen DVDs from a seminar my wife purchased so I could put them on her tablet, and it took half the time it used to on the old PC to rip and convert to MP4. That made the whole upgrade worth it right there

[Losbot]

So what's this rig's main purpose? Just applications?
I might re-purpose my current gaming rig for apps and build a new rig for gaming.

That's when I'll drive up with all the parts and that bottle. We'll pick a weekend that's wife-free for us both. LOL

[FlyingPenguin]

Yeah this is my primary workstation.

[Err]

I had to rip a dozen DVDs from a seminar my wife purchased so I could put them on her tablet, and it took half the time it used to on the old PC to rip and convert to MP4. That made the whole upgrade worth it right there

Is this compared to an I7 2600? If so, that's very impressive.

[FlyingPenguin]

Oh no, my old i7 was even older. It was a first gen Core i7 860