Well, I got the new PC on Friday, and I’ve been trying to get all my data moved across, while doing about a dozen other things.

First of all, this is the first time I’ve had my PC assembled by AusPC Market… well, it’s the first time I’ve bought a whole PC through them.
They do a pretty good job of assembly, but did some things I’d prefer they hadn’t.

For instance, they slapped the “Windows Media Center 2005″ license sticker on the side of it. I now know that they’re required to place the sticker on the PC (because they assembled it), but it’s a big black case — and it’s got this really obvious white and holographic sticker right at the top front corner of it.
To be honest, underneath or at the back would have been a smarter choice for placement, or if they really want it on the side, then down lower and towards the back where you don’t have to look at it all the time would have been better.
I had actually intended to put the Media Center license on the rebuilt (with new motherboard, graphics card, etc) Media Centre machine — but that’s now sitting on a public Vista RC.

Next time: Don’t pick the “Assemble” option … I’ll do it myself.

Anyway.. So, I started fiddling right away — repartitioned the drives so I could install Vista on the side and have a separate Storage partition. Normally, I wouldn’t do this if I were only having one OS. But, because Windows Vista is still in Beta, I’ll be periodically installing the new releases as they come out.

In addition to this – I’ve been trying to get Vista to play nice with the HTPC. It’s … okay at the moment, but it doesn’t like HD channels (Standard Definition [SD] digital is OK).
The live TV buffering is very cool too — missed that story in the news? No problem – rewind back to that section and play it back.

My major gripe (and this is not just Vista, it’s Media Center 2005 too) is that there’s no EPG available for Australia.
Apparently this isn’t Microsoft’s fault — the networks apparently won’t sell/give it to them. If this is true – then the networks are idiots, and the ABC & SBS shouldn’t be following along with this – they’re publicly owned networks and should be giving that info away for free, to all comers.

One line of reasoning given by someone on the Intertron is that the commercial networks are afraid you’ll skip past the ads. Gee, not having an EPG isn’t going to stop me from doing that… infact, I’m now far more likely to go stripping the ads out entirely on any commercial network – just to spite them.
Again, it’s a flawed reasoning (People will use the break time to get up and get a drink, like they do now), and they don’t realise they have all this additional “time shifted” audience. OMG, Every prime-time show could get top ratings! (Just… not right at the moment when it’s broadcast…)

I’ll have to go look at something like EPGRunner or similar to give me the EPG.

Vista is kinda nice… but it needs a lot of work done for driver support… a LOT of work. Microsoft really need to encourage all the hardware vendors to write Vista drivers for their hardware.

Other than that, there’s a lot of nice, subtle improvements most people won’t talk about… like the resource(?) monitor — accessible from the Task Manager, it gives a good rundown of a bunch of vital statistics, on a per-process level. What’s using all your network bandwdith? Take a look. What’s making that HDD grind? Go for it, it’s right there.
You also get the running line-charts similar to the CPU and Memory usage graphs you’re used to in Task Manager. The quick-summary bar gives meaningful results too (i.e MB/sec for Disk/Network IO). There’s a few other things visible too — for example if your CPU supports SpeedStep or a similar technology, then it’ll show the current stepping level on the CPU graph.

Not major improvements, and not worth forking out hundreds of $ in cash to upgrade, but useful all the same.

One thing a lot of people have complained about is the UAC popups requesting Authorisation for a bunch of different things (changing network/hardware settings, overriding file permissions, etc) — sure, it’s a tad annoying (It’s on a lot of the things you need to do when setting up a PC, for instance) – but in day-to-day usage at home, I don’t see a problem.

If it’s possible to train users that “Hey – This dialog means something bad could be done to your PC” – then it’ll be useful for stopping Malware from being installed, hopefully.

Also, if it were at work – then I wouldn’t see much of an issue there either.
The only slightly annoying thing is that it pops up for every new (unsigned) application you run, and any file you’ve downloaded from ‘teh internets’ via Internet Explorer.

I haven’t had a chance to really stretch the legs of this new CPU — according to reports it shouldn’t have any issues going from it’s stock of 1.86Ghz to 2.8Ghz without need of any uber-cooling – if so It’ll be the best bang-for-buck CPU I’ve had since my Celeron 300a went to 450Mhz with the flick of a BIOS setting (and bested anything Intel had out at the time).
I’ve bought decent RAM (brand name DDR2-800, rated at 4-4-4-12 timings), so that should help some too, or so I’m told.
I’ll need to install some games to give it a good work out too.