Today was relatively ho-hum, the main excitement has been turning the Vista box into dual boot XP/Vista and taking some bits out of the old XP box to put into the temporary 7 box. But that four year old Intel 915 system won’t get the boot just yet. When 7 becomes real next year, the Vista box will become the 7 box (just swap over the HDDs) and then the HDD from the Vista box goes into the old XP box. At that point XP may have to be reinstalled if there are HAL problems, and surely Vista will have to be reactivated, but this is going to be the quickest and most pain free way of getting everything set up again. (Why don’t I do that now? Um, err… it hadn’t occurred to me) – actually I’m not quite ready to make the big box the 7 system with all the stuff in it like the Lightscribe DVD writer and card reader, I still need those to be able to run in Vista or XP in case there are problems in 7. Instead I spent a lot of time squeezing a 500 GB HDD into the 7’s low profile case and setting up the Vista box to dual boot XP. Which itself was surely fun as well…and also an opportunity to discover neither of these systems ever had a floppy drive in them – Intel got all carried away with minimalism on some of the Q35 chipset boards and dropped the FDD connector, as well as the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. Well guess which three connectors have re-emerged in the desktop line (and the parallel IDE connector still exists as well)
Anyway, workwise, things have settled down a bit with 7, except for compatible printer drivers (Brother). Some work and some don’t. New ones are coming soon. The lack of a driver that would work on the colour printer led me to fire up the Vista box of sheer necessity in order to print some pictures, and to use its card reader to download them from the camera. That’s why I am setting it up to dual boot with XP, because XP may still be needed in some form, and in the meantime I want three OSs to be on only two PCs, which is quite reasonable. The day is concluding with SP2 going onto the Vista system.