I’ve managed to fix my PC yesterday after a visit to Sim Lim. Apparently, as was suspected, my Power Supply was busted and along with it, my graphic cards (both internal and external) were murdered. Definitely fits the chinese idiom of “祸不单行” (loosely means trouble doesn’t come alone)…

Since I was planning to upgrade some of the hardware for the PC anyway, I decided to just do so on the spot. The shopping list are as follows:

• NVida GEForce 7600 GT
• 1 GB of DDRAM
• Some power supply unit with 5 years warranty

And apparently, they were already selling OEM versions of Windows Vista so I grabbed my copy of Windows Vista Home Premium at $189. Pretty good price (comparable to Windows XP Professional Upgrade 5 years ago) though I lament the fact that some features I wanted can only be found in the Business and Ultimate ($319) editions. Oh yea, you can’t get help from Microsoft if you buy the OEM version too.

Being a new operating system, it is inevitable that there’re some problems running it. Well, I didn’t have much trouble with any hardware since all of them already have their drivers installed when I installed windows. Speaking of that, the installation took rougly 30 minutes. I’m truly impressed. Windows XP installation can take up to 45 minutes for me in the past.If you consider the fact that Vista has 10 times the file size than XP to install, you can truly see the improvement in installation times.

Not much problem with the OS so far except for the annoying new security feature: User Account Control. While I applaud Micorosoft for adding this feature, it has caused me much headache when some applications fail to install to the extent that I’ve decided to disable it for the short-term future until software vendors decide to abide their software by it.

To round up, here’s some interesting read I’ve collected over the past week: Why Malays musn’t cry Racism and Credibility of Bloggers.