Our new Core i7s arrived last Saturday. I set mine up the same day – just couldn’t resist it even though I had plenty of work to get done. I did get the work done, although I stayed up half the night to do it. Worth it? You bet.

Setting up the hardware was a snap. The box is more compact than I expected (maybe because I’m so used to that huge XPS). What really surprised me was how quiet it is. You wouldn’t even know it’s running if not for the lights (which are a very soft blue, not the annoying bright blue of some of my peripherals). On the Dell, the flash card reader has always been loose in its bay so that it shifts when you put a card in. On this computer, the card reader is mounted securely in place. A little thing, but one that matters in the overall experience. There is also a recessed rubberized shallow tray area on the top of the computer. This is great if you want to sit something on top of the box. I have an external Autumn Wave TV tuner box on top of the Dell and it’s always sliding around and trying to fall off if you touch it, so this was a thoughtful touch.

I have the whole thing set up temporarily in the big bay window in the master bedroom, until my new upstairs office to ready to move into. We got the carpet ripped out a couple of weeks ago, painted last weekend and are hoping to get the wood flooring installed next weekend. Then I can move my big L shaped desk from the media room downstairs to the office and put the new computer there. Meanwhile, I’m not complaining. The bedroom is a wonderful place to work in the afternoon and evening (mornings, there’s a little too much sunshine). My view is to die for and the sounds of water (the fountain in the spa and the waterfall from the spa to the pool) has a calming effect. Here are a couple of photos of my workspace:

The machine came with Vista Home Premium x64 installed. I went through the setup process, but wow, was there ever a lot of HP crapware loaded on it. Also had a problem with the 22 inch monitor; Vista wouldn’t give me the option to set it to its maximum resolution (1680 x 1050), and kept switching back to the second monitor as primary when I rebooted.

Oh, well. I had no desire to run Vista anyway. I quickly used Vista’s Disk Management tool to make two 300 GB partitions out of the one huge one. Then I did a clean  install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RC to the second partition and it worked like a dream from the beginning. The installation took less than half an hour, and both monitors were automatically set to their maximum/optimum resolutions. Unlike with the Dell, I had no problem with the sound card (although it’s supposed to be the same model). My iBook USB drive, which was sometimes recognized and sometimes not on the XP machine it had been attached to before, hasn’t disappeared once. And of course without all the “extras,” it booted up in no time at all.

It took another few hours to install all my applications and make all the little configuration changes (set Explorer to show file extensions and hidden files, change my wallpaper to a custom one, get my Quick Launch toolbar on the taskbar, put the taskbar up the left side instead of across the bottom, download and install my favorite gadgets, configure security settings, set up IE 8 the way I wanted it, import my Favorites, configure the Explorer interface the way I wanted it, etc. etc. etc. I installed the following apps: Vipre, Office 2007 Ultimate, Expression Web, Visio 2007, Live Messenger, Live Writer, Photo Gallery, CorelDraw and PhotoPaint x4, Paint Shop Pro, Easy Thumbnails, Adobe Reader, DisplayFusion, PowerISO.  There are a few more that I still need to install but I can get all my basic work done with those.

When I boot up Windows 7 with those same programs installed on the Dell, my memory utilization is 51%.  On the new HP, it’s 19%.  This morning I was running a couple of graphics programs, Outlook, Word, IE (six tabs), Windows Media Center, Live Writer, Messenger and several more apps, and my memory utilization was 26%, processor utilization never went over 10% on any core.

My Windows Experience Index (WEI) is brought down by the video card, a Radeon 4350 which only scores a 4.1.  The Core i7 processor and memory come in at 7.4, as you can see in the screenshot.

Click to enlarge

I’m not too concerned by that “bottleneck,” since I’ve not seen any visible effects on performance. Aero responds smoothly, videos and TV programs play flawlessly, and everything is blazing fast. Maybe if I were a gamer, I would notice the difference.

I’m happy with everything from the speedy delivery (we ordered the systems on the 26th and received them on the 30th) to the price ($1249 for Core i7 920 with 12 GB DDR3 memory, 640 GB hard drive, Lightscribe DVD/CD burner, even two eSATA ports) to the performance of the product. I heard recently that HP is kicking Dell’s A$$ and the reason is obvious.

7 on 7 rocks!

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com