Anybody who follows my system blog knows that my current production system is probably best described as temperamental. Since upgrading to Windows 7 in August of 2009, it’s been a heckofalot better than its previous life under Vista, to be sure, but I’ve had my share of ups and downs with this collection of hardware parts. Here’s a brief description of what’s going on under the hood in this particular box:
| Ed’s Production Windows 7 PC | |
| Case | Antec 900 |
| CPU | Intel QX9650 (Yorkfield, 45 nm) |
| Memory | 2 x 2GB SuperTalent DDR2-800 (5-5-5-18) |
| Graphics | GeForce GTX 275 |
| System HD | Intel X25-M 80GB SSD |
| Other HDs | SpinPoint 1.0 GB (7200 RPM) |
| Cooler | Zalman CNPS 9500 |
| PSU | Gigabyte ODIN 800W |
| Optical drive | Asus BC-1205PT Blu-ray |
Over the past couple of years, I’ve had to deal with numerous instances of blue screens, application hangs, and strange Windows Explorer hangs. I’m also doing increasing work with virtual machines and have found that 4 GB of RAM just isn’t enough to permit me to be productive running regular apps with even one VM open. So I’ve been preparing to upgrade this system to x64 Windows 7 from the current 32-bit x86 version, as documented in my August 2, 2011 blog “Coming Soon (I Hope): Win7 32- to 64-bit Conversion.”
Here’s my problem, depicted in the form of the current Reliability Monitor for the past 20 days: this system has been completely trouble-free pretty much since I wrote the afore-cited blog. Not a single glitch, hitch, blip or hiccup in the interim.
(Click to enlarge)
Frankly, this puts me in a quandry: yeah, sure I do need the extra memory space that converting from 32- to 64-bit Windows 7 will confer thanks to the 8 GB of additional RAM I’ll install into the system to take it up to 12 GB. But I’m slammed with work right now, and it goes against my better instincts to start making major changes to my principal production system right now. I have a 12 GB i7-930 system up and running already anyway, with a GTX 470 graphics card and an even faster Corsair Vertex 2 SSD for the system drive. I’m starting to think that maybe I should migrate to that system instead, and convert this box to test machine status when I upgrade to x64 Windows 7 and add the extra memory. But one thing’s for certain: I’m not doing anything major until the current onslaught of work tapers off a bit. I just don’t have time to make any production changes right now!
