Thomas Nicholson

My old desktop died a few days ago.  I had known over the last few days it was on it’s way out.  I was getting HDD, CD/DVD, RAM and CPU errors.  I’m pretty sure the motherboard was dieing.  I thought the RAM upgrade and a clean upgrade to Vista would make it better.  All was well for a few days until the errors started.  I even removed the new RAM and rolled it back to the factory XP install.  After the recovery install finished it never booted again.

I wasn’t planning on buying a new PC so soon but I can’t be without a computer.  I have a few Linux systems but I need Windows and Office for my teaching and side gigs.  I went to Best Buy with a budget of $1000 and a list of things I wanted.  I wanted a 24″ LCD, 4GB or more of RAM, Quad Core CPU, and it had to be in-stock.

I ended up with two out of four from my list.  It was in-stock and had 4GB of RAM.  I ended up with a 22″ LCD and a Dual Core CPU.  I wasn’t sure what the Dual Core was but it seems like the Celeron of the Core 2 Duo line of CPU’s.  The 22″ LCD in 1600×1050 is very nice and I was able to rotate the screen 90 degrees.  I really like having my monitor in a portrait setting.  I spend 99% of my time in Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) and Firefox so this setup allows me to use 100% of my screen.  I don’t play games or watch movies so widescreen does nothing for me.  I was bumbed since the LCD supports VGA and HDMI that my computer only supports VGA and DVI.  I am guessing the Windows Media systems have the HDMI out for connecting to a HDTV.

I have only had the system for 48 hours and so far so good.  I am having and issue with VMware Server.  Since I’m running Vista 64-bit the system is hard coded for signed drivers only.  I know that it can be disabled in the BIOS but goes back to it’s original settings after reboot.  This is a problem because I would need to edit the BIOS ever time I wanted to run VMware Server.  I use VMware a lot so this is a problem.  I am looking into a fix to the problem now.  If you know a permanent fix or know where I can get a signed driver version of VMware Server please post in the comments.