System Builder’s Blog for June 24, 2008

From time to time, I want to share experiences building Vista systems with our readers. In the last month, I’ve built (and rebuilt) at least three Vista systems, one an upgrade on my Dell Latitude D620 notebook from Windows XP SP3 to Vista Business SP1, another a brand-new build on a QX9650 quad-core system in a very nice Antec 900 case (they call it a gaming case, but I still like it anyway), and another in imaging (then re-imaging) an HP tx2000z tablet PC.

Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate: Upgrade to Vista

The gibberish in the title of this blog is from Dante’s Inferno, and is usually translated as “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Like many others, until I looked this up I was under the misapprehension that the Inferno was written in Latin. It’s not: It’s in Tuscan which, at the time it was written (between 1308 and 1321 AD), was a more or less separate dialect of the modern language we today call Italian. But this phrase conveys the fear and trepidation inherent to going certain places where we’ve all been told, often many times, that it’s best to stay away from.