First Boot

Thursday, 3rd April

Purchase!

Got home, unboxed it - lovely!

First big decision - I had read somewhere that its worth booting a linux cd and repartitioning your HD BEFORE the first boot into Vista:

- The Tx2050 comes with 10Gb of compressed vista install data on a partition, and an otherwise empty hard disc. The first time you power on the machine, it will decompress the contents of this into 25gb of the main partition (mostly bloatware) takes about an hour!

- As part of this install some unmoveable system files will be written into the middle of the hard disk, making it difficult to shrink the partition smaller than about 50% of the hard disc - if you want a small Windows partition, you have a problem!

 There are ways of shrinking the partition beyond the 50% mark, and I wanted to boot into Vista first so that I could just make sure my new computer had no defects BEFORE I started installing weird software.

Booting Vista:

By a long way this is the slowest, klunkiest out of the box experience I have ever had with a computer - just awful! You switch it on and it spends an hour chundering away installing bloatware. I then spent an hour and a half removing the bits I was sure I would never use (using Start->Control Panel->Programs), then I spent two and a half hours burning recovery discs.

Next I used Vista to shrink the windows partition - I wanted to get it down to 40Gb. It would only shrink to 120 at the first time of asking, but after shrinking to 120 and switching off virtual memory, I rebooted the computer, ran the defragmentation utility and then it would allow me to shrink to my preferred size. Other people have needed to use 3rd party partitioning software, but this worked for me.