Everything, Everything

My new graphics card arrived today. The ATI Radeon 3650 isn't fantastic performance, but it's not meant for my main machine (still sporting a 3870). It's a passively cooled card for the HTPC that I'm building out of spare bits (hence the AGP). I got it for the H.264/VC-1 decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, as the dual Xeons probably aren't going to be good enough. What I wasn't expecting was the size of the retail packaging. It was HUUUUGE! Roughly A3 in size.

I was also surprised that the extra RAM from Crucial arrived today (in reasonably sized packaging). It turns out that Vista runs pretty well on a dual 2.4GHz Xeon (with HT) with just 1GB of DDR, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to add an extra couple gigs. In fact, it runs surprisingly well with just a 2MB graphics cards (that I've temporarily installed), although it's stuck with 16-bit colour and Vista's Media Center refuses to show any TV as it demands at least a 64MB graphics card. Still, the new graphics card should solve that. It should also make the system roughly as good as Cheryl's system, but a lot quieter ;)