I’ve been using my old Dell 7920 as my main workstation for more than three years now, and it’s getting a little long in the tooth. In January, I ordered a replacement from Dell. Initially, they quoted delivery in mid-February. After a couple of weeks, that slipped to mid-March. Then to mid April. After having my expectations lowered, I was pleased to see it arrive last week. Yesterday, I fired it up and configured Windows 10.
Yes, Windows 10. It was supposed to ship with Windows 11, but came with Win 10. Upson reflection, I was pleased. My configuration is unusual — the 512 GB of RAM alone makes it so — and I expect that most of the corner-case bugs have been worked out of Win 10, but I’m more suspicious of Win 11.
The Microsoft Windows setup process continues to get more intrusive. I was able to install the OS without having to link it to a Microsoft account, but they didn’t make that easy. I understand that it’s impossible with Win 11. I set up a local admin account, then started poking around for how to join the new machine to my Windows Domain. This gets more deeply buried all the time, but I tracked it down.
Upon the required reboot, I noticed that the time zone was set to CDT. The option to change the time zone was greyed out. I messed around with regedit, and changed the things that Microsoft said should fix it, but it didn’t work. So I logged off, and logged into the local account, made the change, logged back into the domain, and the problem was fixed.
Dell configured the computer with a single 2 TB SSD as the boot drive, and four 1 TB spinning rust drives that I intend to replace with 16 TB ones (the only way to get the slots wired up and the disk carriers from Dell is to order some cheap disks). But I wanted more SSD storage, so I had ordered a OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe drive, which came loaded with 4 8TB SSDs. I fired up the Disk Manager, and saw the drives. Each had three partitions, and none were visible in the file manager. The skinny OWC documentation said that the drives came preformatted for SoftRAID. I called OWC tech support, and, after more than half an hour on hold, I asked the tech if there would be any problem if I just deleted all the volumes, and used the built-in Windows disk aggregation tools. He said that would work, so that’s what I did. I left two of the 4 drives as JBOD, and configured two of them as striped.
I installed Firefox and Chrome, and also LastPass. That made it easy to install Dropbox and Creative Cloud. I then downloaded all my Adobe apps. I set up GoodSync and started transferring files from the old workstation. That took two days.
I installed Office, Visio, Fast Raw Viewer, RawDigger, DNG Converter, libraw, and Matlab. I installed Helicon Focus. Although I already had a lifetime license, I bought another for this installation, figuring those folks need al the help they can get.
One of the nice things about setting up a new computer is you get to decide whether or not to install some apps from your old machine. Here’s a partial list of the ones I am not installing, at least for now:
- PTGui
- Zerene Stacker
- Capture 1
- LRTimelapse
- PhotoZoom Pro
- DxO PhotoLab 5
- DxO Pure Raw
- ON1 PhotoRaw
- Mastin Labs and other presets
- Sony Imaging Edge
- Studio One 5
- CyberLink YouCam 9
- PluginAlliance Audio plugins
- Topaz Sharpen, Mask, DeNoise, GigaPixel AI
- XRite color camera calibration
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