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I can’t say that this was an easy decision for me. I had long loved and had great affection for my self built P4 2.4Ghz box running Windows XP SP2 that I had been using for years. The computer had been rock solid and even when I brought home my new 64-bit Vista HP powerhouse, I still used the old computer more often out of comfort and familiarity.

Recently, my motherboard had started to fail and to be honest, I was starting to feel the computer’s age when compared against the newer box. Now logic might lead you to ask why I didn’t just switch to the new box and retire this box completely. The answer would be that I just can’t seem to manage on a single box, and that the new 64-bit machine, while awesome for gaming, Photoshop work, and all my media madness that my iMac doesn’t serve, just has a different bag of tricks than my development machine which I am retiring.

So early this week I placed an order to Newegg.com to replace all of the guts of this machine and make it shiny and new again. It was literally when it was time to install an OS that I made the final decision to install Vista and not XP SP3.

The new (old) box is now a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram, 400GB HD and a nVidia GeForce 8400 GS video card with two 20" LCD monitors and a DVD-RW drive.

The build process went surprisingly smooth. I got home about 5:30PM, grabbed the old PC and the box of parts and went to the kitchen table. I removed all of the offending parts from the case, installed CPU and RAM into the new motherboard, screwed it in place, connected all of the cables and inserted the video card. Once that was complete, I closed the case, carried it downstairs, plugged it in and bam, it was ready to install Vista. I had not one single problem or incedent in the build…..amazing.

By 6:30, Vista was installed and I was updating and installing software. The entire build and OS install took an hour….wow!

It’s now 9:30 and including a break for dinner, all of my applications are installed, and updated, the OS is updated and all of my email accounts, IM, browser faves, printers and file shares are good to go. Now with the exception of two Macs running OS X 10.5 Leopard, all of my PCs are running Vista Ultimate at home and Vista Enterprise at work.

This is one computer crazy household for sure, but now the tide has definitely turned towards Vista being the dominant OS. Our household has 6 running PCs and 2 laptops (not counting work machines) and the OS split breaks down to 3 Vista Ultimate (1 64bit), 2 Windows XP and 3 OS X Leopard. Sure OS X and Vista are tied at the moment, but Dawn’s old PC is giving up the ghost shortly to be updated to a Vista machine as well.

And for the record…I am loving Vista. I kind of look at it like some people do underwear. Sure the new pairs are a little too tight and don’t quite fit your bum like the holy ones, but if you take the time to wash and wear them a few times, they feel just like they should. Give Vista a real chance on a machine worthy of running it, and I doubt you will be dissapointed.