Vista and software don't mix

Today I had two topics that needed my attention. My car has a bad noise under the bonnet and get everything installed on my laptop that I need so that I can start working on it.

First my car. I tried to figure out what the problem was myself but no success, so I took it to a workshop I know. They also can't say for sure but think is something with the distributor. The first open spot they have to open it and see what is what is in a few day so now i must try and drive around as little as possible. :( Hopefully it is not something that is going to empty the bank account, will have to wait and see.

When I got home from the workshop I fired up my laptop and started installing all the stuff. One of the important software that must work without trouble is matlab and it gives trouble some times. The version I have is bit old thus don't know something like vista. When matlab start up it give out error messages, that it could not load certain directx components. I thought lets see what happens if I just continue anyway. Normal calculations is fine as far as I know but in some situation a plot is lock and I can not get it close or anything.
Now I could just forget about Vista and install XP and most software trouble would go away, or I could get a newer matlab. Or struggle on as is and find solution to problems later.

I also went cycling in majik forest this afternoon. It was fun. Although I push it hard today I did not fall. Now I'm tired and fed up with windows after it gave me a BSOD while typing this and I need sleep.

My New Toy/Work Machine

On Wednesday 5 December I got a phone call that my new laptop was ready for pickup. I felt like a 5 year old boy on Christmas morning. It's a HP 8710P with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz T7300, 2048MB ram, 256MB NVidia Quadro NVS 320M(a.k.a Geforce8700) with a 17" wide screen(1440x900), 160Gb SATA harddrive and Vista Business.(Review link) . I thought that it is going to be big and it is. Below is a picture of the the laptop with a car magazine on it. It weights in at 3.3kg of which the battery alone is 0.5kg and when you pick it up it feels lighter than what is expected.

On the first startup Vista must first install. After a while I realised something is not right. The machine does not restart. It goes through most of the motions but some where it just hangs. Then I called HP support. They told me that in the bios there is a harddrive test function and that I must run that to check if that harddrive is fine. After I done that I notice that as I exit the bios it also hangs. HP then told me they think it may be the motherboard so I must send it back as a DOA(Defective on arrival). I bought it at PC Laptops so I took it back there on Friday 7 December. And today I got a brand new one. Once again I had to go through the Vista installation, this time without any trouble.

It has a Biometric finger print reader and it's fun. The software for the fingerprint reader can be setup so that it can be used for windows, website and email logins. The down side is that if I'm going to use it to much I'm going to forget my passwords and then when I'm somewhere at some other pc I cant login. Guess I shouldn't use it too much.

The performance so far is great. I ran SuperPi today. For those who don't know SuperPi, it is a small program that calculate the value of pi to an accuracy of a certain amount of decimal places. Here is the results:
TIME [ DECIMALS]
+ 000h 00m 01s [ 64K]
+ 000h 00m 02s [ 128K]
+ 000h 00m 05s [ 256K]
+ 000h 00m 11s [ 512K]
+ 000h 00m 25s [ 1M]
+ 000h 00m 59s [ 2M]
+ 000h 02m 16s [ 4M]
+ 000h 05m 04s [ 8M]
+ 000h 11m 16s [ 16M]
+ 000h 24m 10s [ 32M]
I think that is not bad at all.

I don't have 3dMark06 to test it myself my the reviews say the the Quadro NVS 320M gives a score of 4781. I think that it is not bad for a laptop. The only problem that I have with it, is that is that is does not have a s-video out. It has HDMI out but there is no converters from HDMI to any analog form so I can't connect it to a normal TV.

I believe that I'm going to enjoy this new toy and will guard it with my life.