I’ve been frantically rebuilding my HTPC and as a consequence have stumbled upon the limitations of Vista when it comes to transferring files across a network. For the life of me I can’t figure out why Vista hangs when I just want to copy a file from it. I was cursing this damn D-Link gigabit switch I purchased on the weekend, thinking it was the piece of shit that so many people on Whirlpool Forums claim D-Link is; however it is yet to be established as it seems to be working and it has been pretty much plug and play apart from Vista being a pain.

As a desperate measure I abandoned a file transfer from the Vista end and tried it from the XP end, which is what my HTPC is running on, lo and behold, my files easily copy. I’m not getting blistering performance considering it took 16 minutes to transfer 40 gigs of data but I don’t believe the switch is to blame for the slowness (I say this with tongue in cheek – it is a hell of lot faster than the standard 100 megabit port on my router), again Vista inherits the crown by not being able to handle AHCI on my SB600 south bridge chipset which is perhaps slowing down my SATA drives because they’re in IDE mode but it may be due to the ATI SB600 period. Ok I can take some of the blame by not researching and installing drivers at the OS install stage, along with ASUS and perhaps AMD/ATI for releasing a less than bug free chipset.

I started this upgrade on my HTPC Sunday afternoon after I hesitated with the heavy apprehension of yet again ripping the guts out of the box and installing a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and Graphics Card. Well the Graphics Card is new and the other parts were from previous builds, I wanted to test out an ATI card instead of the NVIDIA 7600GT I had in it.

My apprehension was justified when it came to booting it for the OS install – no damn video! WTF! After frigging around trying out a 7900GS thinking the 3450 was dead, still no video showing. Damn it! All that effort of removing parts, adding extra power cables to power the 7900GS and to no avail. Ok it was back to basics, rip out the 7900S, pull out USB connectors, reseat the ram and clear CMOS and then put it back again. Yep. User error. I must have had some ports and connectors installed incorrectly, because it posted after reconnecting the various plugs and DIMM modules – no trivial feat as the HTPC case is lacking room to move, certainly a tight fit – not a great deal of space for clumsy fingers like mine. The drama wasn’t over. The time came to installing Windows XP and the fucking thing doesn’t install onto C: drive! Because I had another drive with partitions already installed, Windows decides to create the boot drive as E: drive. Great! Just fucking wonderful! No option but to reinstall it.

Monday morning – 1:30am. Finished installing SP3. Time for bed. The rest of this week has been reinstalling software and reconfiguring Media Portal and the job still has a way to goes. Media Portal has changed so now it’s a process of re-acquainting myself with its new idiosyncracies. Still trying to figure out the Vista problem but it’s like looking for a needle in hay stack – it certainly makes me wonder if these incompatabilities are intentional. Would Microsoft create headaches so the least problematic solution is to upgrade the other PC’s to Vista? Would a monopoly do such a thing?