New machine!

[Sceadwian]

I'm pretty psyched, I get to pick up my new machine tomorrow. A Dell XPS420 with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 3 gigs of ram and a 360 gig HD, the video card is a Radeon HD 2400 pro which is crap for 3D but supposed to be great for video, might have to update it later. Seems pretty solid, and as a bonus it has a miniature LCD screen on the top of the case with simple arrow keypad and select buttons, supposed to be able to run some mini apps on it.

Anyone else have experiance with the Core 2 Quads? The benchmarks are pretty great and I do multi task a lot. I'm going to try running something like seti@home or folding@home on one processor and see if the machine still does everything else acceptably as I know most games and software can't take advantage of all four cores at the same time.

It's also going to be my first venture into using Windows Vista.

Anyone have tips tricks advice or comments they'd like to share especially with Vista? How different from XP is the actual core system in Vista or is it mostly just window dressing?

 

[HarveyH42]

I just got a new HP about a month ago, and just now getting started putting crap on it. Haven't seen any of the feared problems with Vista yet, maybe they were fixed in one of the 5 updates... good thing I'm on the free wireless the city provides.

The bootup is fast, but might be the lack of crap, I've yet to install. Seems pretty stable. The start menu is kind of messed up, have had trouble locating a program I installed. Mostly it's seems about the same, still have tried changing much of anything, or deleting crap I'll never use. I've got 400 gig, don't figure I'll have it filled for a while. Only 60 gig on the XP.

 

[HiTech]

Core 2 Quad? I thought it was either a Core 2 or a Quad Core not both. Anyway the quads run hot! So monitor temps with dedicated monitoring pgm like Everest Ultimate or similar to see if the OEM stock cooling is adequate. Other than that quad cores are primarily for large multitasking. Core 2 is very adequate for gaming. As for the OS I'd suggest that you dump Vista and get yourself a 64-bit version of XP Professional. I'm assuming your Quad core is 64bit?

 

[Sceadwian]

This is a stock Dell machine so I'm not too concerned about heat off the start, but I will start monitoring it before I start overclocking or anything weird, the warranty transferred fine, the guy has only had it six months, he overbought so he picked up a much sleeker more appropriate one for himself and was trying to get rid of this one, the machine is mint, I really got a good deal. He's a real gadget guy, not geek but gadget, so I'm guessing the bank budget was tight and he went for the most expensive bit he had to get rid of.

And actually this isn't technically a 'quad core' it's a slap dash hybrid Intel threw together before AMD drops their quad core chips. I hear nothing but rave reviews though for maximum performance you need to set processor affinity a bit. It's two core 2 duo chips on the same die. So it's two separate core 2 duos together. Yes, it's 64 bit but what's the big deal? Games and software are by large and far 32 bit. I"m going to give Vista a good try (It's service pack 1 now so it's worth a shot) I dragged and dropped =) my TV tuner from the old machine to the new one and Vista chewed it up and spit out TV inside of the time it took to download the guide data, it also plug and played my monitor, keyboard and mouse flawlessly. It's a good start at least.

I want to stay on the good side of the law so to speak. I really want to try Vista though, but I still have a copy of XP Pro with a legal license to fall back on, it's for 1-2 processors though I'm not sure how that works out with multi core chips.