Well, such a big project and now it’s over. Very pleased with the new box, just a few niggles of things maybe I should have checked over before I started. Mainly that this board has only got provision for 8 USB sockets, one of those is taken by the card reader and I wanted more of them on the back. So there are only 4 USB sockets on the back. However, the suppliers don’t bring every board model into NZ and there is quite a step up in price ($50 or more) to get more sockets (12). Given that there are several models of board in between, Intel is being silly not to put more sockets onto the lower priced boards – that board with 12 socket connections is a high performance model with DDR3 memory. But Intel is funny like that. All the Series 4 and 5 boards have PS/2 sockets for keyboard and mouse, but most of the Series 3 boards left these out altogether. My PC at work is such a creature and everything has to be USB, not that that is such a bad thing. Either I could swap two front USB sockets to the back (using a backplane adapter) or I could put in an accessory card with 4 more on it, which I may do. Also likely to be appearing in the backplane slots are an eSata socket and the 9 pin serial socket.
The next thing to look at is backup. Many years ago I bought a 400 MB Iomega tape drive to back up a previous computer. Those were the days. After that died, it was occasional CD and DVD based backups. Then I bought an external HDD enclosure and put a 40 GB laptop HDD in it. A great move, the only problem is that it is now too small. So I have to get a bigger external disk, maybe 250 GB or more. I trialled running Windows Backup on the new system and it said it needed 70 GB to back up my documents and pictures. And the backup could also include a system image if I wanted it to, although I don’t know that I will do that. 250 GB is a lot but it will probably need to store more than one generation of backups. However, online backup services are starting to become affordable, except for our ridiculously high broadband charges in NZ. Maybe in the future it will be possible to use these more than I have looked at so far.
One thing I have finally worked out how to do is to change the location of My Documents and My Pictures. I couldn’t work out from the time I installed Windows 7 at home why IrfanView wouldn’t recognise the “new” location of My Pictures which is on a different drive so it is not in the normal userprofile location. Well, it turns out that even though you can change the folder locations in the Libraries, this doesn’t actually change the stored locations in the system. You still have to find the folders in your profile and tell Windows that they are supposed to be in a different location. Now I can use My Pictures in IrfanView to find all my photos like under XP.