Behold the newest member of the Murphy Technical Services family. This gorgeous little minx is being installed tomorrow as part of the semiannual upgrade process.
Other festivities will include:
- A full nuke & pave with a fresh copy of Windows 10 Professional. I’ve been running the “upgrade” from Windows 7, and I don’t think that upgrade is entirely stable. Plus I haven’t done a nuke & pave in two years. Usually I try to go yearly, but this time around I was running into issues with Microsoft accepting payment. Go figure. So I had to go out and buy the gorram DVD from MicroCenter along with that drive.
- Reinstalling a stripped software set. I have a lot of software on the current build I never use, and I’ve uninstalled more than I can remember, meaning the registry is full of weird little orphan entries for stuff that hasn’t been installed in years. By the time I’m done this thing will be all optimized and streamlined for software development. And gaming. Oh dear Elvis will it be all greasy for most excellent gaming.
- Yanking three of the existing hard drives. The current system drive has been acting as such for the better part of a decade and two separate builds now. That’s gorram geriatric by Tech Services standards; they usually burn out long before then. While I’m at it, I’ll replace the system drive with the 2TB storage drive I just nuked. Going to pull two of the other storage drives while I’m at it as well.
- Installing that beautiful new 12TB unit. At the end of the process I’ll have a 2TB system drive, and 5TB and 12TB bulk storage drives. This will not only clear up some organizational issues, but also cut down on power use and still increase total storage drive capacity from 13TB to 17TB. With two 3TB drives stashed away if necessary.
I expect the process to eat most of Saturday. Most of that time will just be watching things install and doing file transfers while I have Netflix running on the secondary monitor; the hardware end is about half an hour total split into two fifteen minute segments.
Realistically, I’ll probably have most of it done by Saturday night then leave some reinstalls and updates going all night. The Blizzard and Steam reinstalls are going to take hours all by themselves; I expect WoW and Diablo III alone to take a chunk of time, not to mention Fallout: New Vegas and the Half-Life series. Then there will doubtless be several incidents over the next few weeks where I realize I missed something stupid and have to install it, but that’s how it always goes.
After this, the only real upgrade left is a better video card. The one I have now is good, but it isn’t great. I had a really spiffy one ready to go until I found out it wasn’t compatible with my old power supply so I had to go with this one instead. Now that I have the 1.8KW shoebox power supply (seriously, it’s huge) I can go absolutely psycho nuclear with a video card.