After a little more than three weeks with the new computer, I’m mostly happy with it. It’s blindingly fast, both in processing and in disk access. And whisper quiet, really. I got into the office very early the other day–about 4:30 AM–when there was almost no background noise. I could barely hear the computer. The Dell flat panel monitor on my desk was making more noise than the computer, and I could hear the machine in the other room (a machine that I used to think was quiet) better than I could hear the one right next to my desk.

Windows XP 64 is working well for me, although there are a few of oddities:

• For some reason there’s no “minimize all” button on the quick launch bar. That’s a handy little tool to hit when I want to quickly see my desktop. Fortunately there is a key combination–Windows key+D–that will do the same thing, but I’m used to hitting the button with my mouse.
• I put my Windows task bar on the right side of the screen rather than at the bottom. I started doing that years ago because vertical screen space was hard to come by. As a programmer, I want to see as many lines of code as possible. There have always been a few oddities with having the task bar over there, mostly due to application developers not taking into account the possibility. But the problem I’m having on XP 64 is not caused by that. For some reason, when I reboot the task bar takes on some default size values. I have to resize it after every reboot.
• The Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP don’t work on XP 64. I really miss CmdHere and SyncToy.
• XP 64 doesn’t run 16-bit apps. I knew that going in, and I can understand why. But it’s disappointing nonetheless. I have some utility programs that I last compiled in 1987 and that I used on a regular basis until I upgraded to this machine. I can probably just recompile some of them–those that I wrote in C. The ones I wrote in assembler will take a little work to port, and those that I created with Turbo Pascal will have to be rewritten entirely.
• The Windows SORT utility is worthless for sorting large files. It sorted a 1.6 gigabyte file just fine, but choked when I gave it a 3 gigabyte file. I can’t imagine why it runs out of memory when it’s supposed to make use of temporary files. And apparently it reads strings into fixed-length records for sorting. Seems like a bad design decision to me.
• I’m convinced that the NT file system is not designed to reduce fragmentation. I’m working with large (2 gigabytes and more) files. The file system insists on filling the small empty spaces on the disk before allocating any of the huge unused space. As a result, I get fragmentation like you wouldn’t believe.

That said, I’m pretty dang happy with the new machine. It’s taken some time getting accustomed to the full-sized keyboard again after two years on the laptop, and I’m still suffering a bit from not having some tools, but in general I really like the new machine.