Dreadnought: from Zero to Windows 7 in a couple of hours.  Page 8

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It seemed like forever before the UBT arrived with the new memory.  Might have had something to do with waking up at 3:30 am.  Insomnia can be fun.  Eventually the package arrived and it contained what I'd been waiting for.  16 gigabytes of "registered memory" WINTEC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR2 667  

So I went to work on it.  Carefully opened the packages, making sure I didn't let any static buildup zap the dimms, then popped 'em into their slots on the mobo.

So here they are, all in their slots.  It took a major amount of will power to stop and get the camera.  I wanted to fire it up real sudden-like.

But I took the shots and closed my eyes to the wiring mess (it'll get tidied up soon enough) and then hit the Power switch.

I had to stop and connect the monitor to the onboard video controller, so that took me a minute or so.  Then I couldn't find the SSD.  After chasin my tail for a while I looked and saw that a cable had come loose on it.  Then I started fiddling with the BIOS. Not too much, just wanted to set the boot device order and a coupla little things like that.  Then I had to RTFM a bit cuz I still didn't see the SSD OR the DVD drive in the BIOS.

More tail chasing.  Then I found that the SATA ports are numbered backward from what seemed to be intuitive to me.  More messin around with cables.

Then I finally got it to see all the devices and started loading Win 7 64-bit.  I'd never seen the OS before today.  I ended up fumbling around and managed to screw up the 500 gig HDD that I was gonna use for swapfile and program storage.  I just wanted to format the thing and somehow ended up making it a system drive.  Then I couldn't do nuttin with it.  I tried installing the drive in another machine, but that didn't work, either.

Eventually I said, "the hell with it" and reinstalled Win 7 on the SSD with the HDD disconnected.  That went fine. 

Here it is in the middle of the installation. I had to rummage around to find a long CAT-5 cable to put it on the LAN.  That was the easiest LAN connection I've EVER seen.  It just did it.  Period.

I activated the Windoze installation, downloaded Firefox, got that running and set up the way I like it and then tried the HDD again.  No workee.  I'm gonna have to do some investigating on that.

I changed the screen resolution, the wallpaper, etc. and then tried to find the driver CD for the Radeon 4890 video card.  It musta grown legs and wandered off somewhere.  So as I type this, it's downloading the driver package from the web.  I also tried to install the driver for the sound card, but it didn't like the OS.  So I spose I'll have to chase down a driver for it, too. 

But it's running.  It sees all the memory, both processors, all 8 cores and boots in 15 seconds.  Considering the fact that I'd never seen Win 7 before; I'd never dealt with a dual processor system and never used an SSD, I'm pretty happy that it's alive and doing its thing.  Stay tuned for further adventures as the benchmarking and tweaking begins.

Dreadnought moved from the assembly area to the production area.  That is, I got tired of running from one side of the house to the other to test stuff.

So I rearranged things a bit, bringing it closer to my current workstation which is just off to the right of the photo.  It's been a series of little things over the last couple of days.  Getting a couple of EIDE hard disks so that the only thing on the SDD is the OS was one.  I still need to test the SATA HDD controller.  Then the video card was a nightmare.  It only became visible to the system when I moved it to a different card slot.

I tried using a peripheral switch so I could use the same keyboard, mouse and screen on both machines, but for some reason, every time I'd switchback to the new box, it would go into default graphics mode and I'd have to tell it to re-scan the video device and reset the screen resolution.  Then the mouse would hang up from time to time.  That got old real quick.  So I rummaged up an old KB and mouse and took a monitor off another system and, viola, it works.  No more hassles from the switch.

Another thing I've been trying to do is flash the Solid State Disk's firmware to the latest level. I just read a response on the OCZ support forum and it gave me some other things to try.
I have to give these guys credit.  They're doing their best to make sure that questions are answered and problems resolved.

I got the new keyboard and trackball today (02/11/2010) and I love the keyboard with its red backlit keys.  The trackball is gonna take some gettin used to. Bit it's lookin more like a complete system now and performing very well.

I tried the trackball on the left (which is how I'd use the mouse) but I just don't have the dexterity to use it that way at the moment. So it's a right-hand trackball for the time being.

I also installed a 320 Gig HDD for programn files only. The rest of the disks will migrate from the smaller box incrementally. Right now I've found that my trusty old version of Cold Fusion won't work wih Win 7. I'm testing out different development IDEs and this is being greated with WeBulider 2010. I'm also looking into Dreamweaver if I can get one of my clients to buy it for me.

More later.

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