After Christmas, I set out to assemble the parts of my new x64 workstation:

• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
• Athlon 64 3700+
• 2 GB of memory (to be upgraded next week to 4GB)
• 2 WD 400GB RE2 hard disks (used in a mirror, I am too old and lazy for data loss)
• Matrox Millenium P650 PCIe graphics card
• Optical drives (DVD-RAM & DVD-RW DL) - reused from the old workstation
• Arctic Cooling Silentium T5 midi tower case

Lessons learned:

• InCD 4 is my enemy #1 for 2005 - it doesn't work (even install) on XP Pro x64
• Not all AV products' realtime scanners like x64
• If you are used to Arctic Cooling CPU fans, don't install the out-of-the-box fan that ships with your CPU - you will be disappointed. And opening the case soon again to replace it.
• Dual-head sucks. Why doesn't Matrox ship a triple-head card for PCIe?

I am pretty sure those ain't all the snags I will encounter, especially as Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now waiting to be installed instead of VPC 2004 on this machine.

Update Speaking of snags - the Canon LIDE 60 scanner doesn't work on x64. The driver simply doesn't support it. How craptacular.