Tag Archives: set-up.development

Setting up a new PC

My main development PC is now 5 years old and the end of life for Windows 10 is looming. I might be upgrade it to Windows 11 (there is apparently a BIOS hack if your chip doesn’t have the required TPM module), but it is quite crufty from 5 years of daily use. And it recently crashed and spent 20 minutes doing a Windows spontaneous repair, which is not very confidence inspriring. Plus the thought of a faster processor, more memory and a bigger SSD is always alluring. Time for a spanky new Windows 11 PC.

I ordered a PC to my own spec from pcspecialist.co.uk using their online configurator. I have used them a few times previously and have been suitably impressed with the service.

The new PC has:

  • Windows 11 Home
  • AMD Ryzen 9 9900X 12-Core processor
  • NVidia 3050 graphics card
  • 64 GB DDR5 RAM
  • 4 TB Samsung PRO M.2 SSD
  • 2 x Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDDs
  • Corsair Gold Ultra Quiet 650W power supply

Reliability in the key issue for me, so I won’t be messing around with overclocking or other tweaks.

I’ve had a power supply blow up and take out the motherboard before, so I went for a branded power supply.

I didn’t see any real need for Windows 11Pro.

I wanted a quiet case that would sit under my desk, rather than the bling LED disco cases offered by PC Specialist. Or, even worse, a white case (god no). So I ordered a black mid size Fractal Design Define 7 case and had it delivered to them for the build.

The finished PC turned up after a couple of weeks. They have did a nice job, with some neat cabling.

Now it is just the tedious job of setting it all up. Windows offered to copy across the settings from my previous machine, but I wanted a cruft-free, clean install. So I manually installed everything from scratch:

  • Thunderbird (email)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community (C++)
  • Eset (anti-virus)
  • Firefox (browser)
  • Chrome (browser)
  • Tortoise SVN (version control)
  • Qt (cross platform development)
  • libXL (Excel development library)
  • Inno Setup (installer)
  • Help and Manual (documentation)
  • Beyond Compare (file comparison)
  • Axialis icon workshop and icon generator (icons)
  • Axcrypt (encryption)
  • Snag It (screen capture)
  • Camtasia (video authoring)
  • Search Everything (Windows search)
  • A1 sitemap generator (website sitemaps)
  • PNGCrush (PNG compression)
  • ScreenToGif (GIF creation)
  • Microsoft Office (spreadsheets etc)
  • Skype (phone)
  • Canon printer/scanner utilities
  • MylifeOrganized (outliner)
  • Phrase Expander (phrase expander)
  • Affinity Photo 2 (photo editing)
  • Batch Photo (batch photo editing)
  • DropBox (file sync)
  • Steam (games)

Then I had to get it to build my own applications: PerfectTablePlan, Hyper Plan and Easy Data Transform. Plus set up printers, scanners, backup etc and physically secure the case.

Phew!

Where possible I tried to download software direct from the manufacturers website. In a few cases where I didn’t want to pay to upgrade, and the old version wasn’t available, I used old downloads that I had kept.

I needed Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, rather than 2022, due to compatibility issues with Qt. The 2019 version is not easy to find online, but is currently still available.

I copied across my Thunderbird message filters from the old PC.

I did some quick benchmarks:

  • The Easy Data Transform compile time has gone from 51 seconds, on the old PC, to 26 seconds, on the new PC.
  • An Easy Data Transform benchmark that inputs, joins, sorts and outputs a million row dataset, has gone from 14.3 seconds , on the old PC, to 10.3 seconds, on the new PC.

So a significant speed improvement.

Currently I have 3 PCs and 1 Mac, 3 monitors, 4 mice and 4 keyboards. It is a mess. I have tried a physical KVM switch in the past, but it felt very clunky. Following a tipoff from a friend, I am going to investigate www.sharemouse.com as a way to make this more manageable. Do you have a good way to manage multiple monitors, mice and keyboards? Please let me know in the comments.