Shareware Beach

When I referenced my 2005 behind the scenes post in a recent entry on Windows Vista, it reminded me it’s time for another look behind the scenes. My current setup is quite different from what I had two years ago.

The hardware is all new. Later in 2005, my PC broke down, and I decided to get a whole new system with a dual core CPU: the Pentium D 820. It was the cheapest at the time, and it’s still serving me just fine. I put the CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard disk and a GeForce 6600 card into the Shuttle SD31P bare-bones system. I replaced my two hulking 19″ CRT monitors with two LG L1980Q 19″ LCDs. While I was at it, I installed Windows XP as my main development OS. I now have a triple-boot system with Windows XP, my old Windows 2000 setup, and Vista x64 for testing. Installing Vista went totally smoothly. The only hardware it didn’t recognize was the SoundBlaster Live that’s built into the SD31P. I easily downloaded the drivers from Creative’s web site. I’ll be sticking with XP as my main development OS for the time being though. I probably won’t switch to Vista until there’s a 64-bit version of Delphi, which will likely take another year or two.

I also migrated from Delphi 7 to Delphi 2006. Though the new IDE requires a lot more memory and CPU power than nimble old D7, the new IDE features are well worth it. Particularly the debugging enhancements like being able to see local variables for the whole call stack and expanding objects to see their properties in watches and debugger tooltips are great.

So, what happened to my keyboard and mouse? As I wrote back in September, early but undeniable symptoms of RSI prompted my to rethink my habits and equipment. As for input devices, I’ve settled for a DataHand instead of a keyboard, and a Microsoft Explorer trackball instead of a mouse. Yes, it’s really possible to type as fast on a DataHand as on a normal keyboard. With practice. But I’m happy to be typing at all.