The Alien has been powered up, quieted down and now it's time to put the Personalized in Personal Computer. First thing first, we're going to need to adjust the lights on this box. The massive amount of lighting it is just a bit strange. Luckily, the Alien Command Center allows you to shut down any of the various parts of the lighting. I turned off the sides right away and stuck with the blue for the Alien and front lighting. It's more subtle that way.
With that out of the way, it's all about the downloads. Windows Updates, iTunes, an anti-virus system, Open Office, Firefox, Spybot. The list is quite lengthy at for a modern computer. But they are everything a fellow needs to get his system in shape.
Those all downloaded and installed without issue. This is the first time I've experimented with a 64-bit OS in some time, but so far everything was working fine. Opening Firefox was unbelievably fast - Alien rendered pages faster than I've ever seen. More validation of a good blend of parts.
The next step was to add some more storage. I had only ordered a 500GB drive for the OS volume. That was going to be plenty. I had a couple of extra 1TB drives lying around so those were going into the system for file storage.
Power down. Open up the case.
I could have wept with joy. Every drive bay had a tool-less bay, similar to my HP MediaSmart server. Even better, each one of the 3 available bays was pre-cabled for both power and a SATA cable. I wasn't going to have to tear the machine apart to put some ugly cable runs in. Thank you Alienware! I slid in the 2 drives in about a minute each and was done. Next, I booted into the BIOS and configured them into a RAID-1 mirror. This was going to be my data volume so I wanted to make sure I had some redundancy in the system.
Since I had the system open, I thought to move my TV tuner card over as well. Not so fast. There was only one open PCI slot and that was taken by the Creative Labs X-Fi board. I guess if I want a tuner, I'm going to have to get an external unit. Oh well, I have plenty of USB slots.
The last thing is just to move the data over from my old PC and then this baby is ready for business. After that, I'll move one more 1TB drive into the Alien so I have room for plenty of game installs and I'll be done.
I am very happy with the maintainability of this machine. I have a few ideas moving forward, such as overclocking and perhaps adding memory. I'll be sure to update everyone here as to how that all goes. In the meantime, I'm going to go off and enjoy this fine machine.
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