My new Dell Dimension 4600 (2.8Ghz P4) desktop showed up yesterday. Picking up the shipping box, I was pleasantly surprised that the case is much lighter (a bonus when I need to shlep it from my office to the car, two blocks away.) Unfortunately, upon opening the box I was disappointed to see a regular style case, as opposed to the slick tool free cases that I’ve become used to from Dell. Guess its not too big a deal, since I don’t open up my case all that often.
The power supply and CPU fans are much quiter than in my Dell 4300 that’s being replaced. Doesn’t have that strange CPU air scoop that acts like an amplifier for fan noise; much nicer! Unfortunately, the hard drive is pretty noisy.
Everything worked fine on first boot up. Windows XP rebooted a few times after the regular setup and configuration process. After a few more reboots for Windows Update (random note: after the first batch of critical updates, the pc now goes to the v5, aka SP2, version of the update site. Just more eye candy, as far as I could see.) and an update to the provided Antivirus software, I was able to actually do something for real.
Of course, by this I mean, fire up Doom3. Amazing what a difference doubling your processor speed and adding 25% more RAM can have on your gaming experience. A newer video card also probably doesn’t hurt. Previously, the game played so slow, you couldn’t return fire. Nice to able to shoot back at all those nasty imps.
Next on the list is to install all my normal apps (requiring about 47 more reboots; Linux looks better and better every day) and move a bunch of data over from the older machine.
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