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As mentioned on page 2, the software bundle wasn't too great, it would have been nice to have seen an office suite of some kind lurking on the system somewhere. A copy of OpenOffice at the very least, which would cost Time very little. Granted, Microsoft's Office suite, or even a copy of Works, would just add to an already wallet busting cost for the UltraStation. Software licensing pressure from the Redmond giant? Just a misconfiguration in the test box which should have shipped with something Office wise? I can't confirm either.
However, the DVD authoring software was present and correct, and with some media procured from my local PC store (none was supplied), the Pinnacle software was given a thorough run.
Being a DVD-RW capable device, I thought it prudent to test both single shot -R writing, along with packet writing in UDF format on the -RW side of things.
Both worked perfectly, and I was able to master 4.7GB data discs as easy as I would writing CDR's, using my CDRW drive on my main machine. Pinnacle's gives Instant DVD a Nero-like interface, something that most people will be familar with, and even if they aren't, Instant DVD doesn't need much familiarisation to become comfortable with its usage.
It's also able to rip audio CD's to the spacious hard drive in WAV, Microsoft WMA and MP3 formats. Instant DVD doesn't support MP3 out of the box in the cut down version, but the full version supplied with the UltraStation fully supported the format.
Here's a few shots of the Pinnacle software in use.
Other Software and General Setup
As far as Windows XP was concerned, we've already noted that it came preinstalled with Service Pack 1 and all current patches from Windows Update.
It was configured with a single administrator account with no password, out of the box, but I'm told the user manuals assist you in creating other basic, protected accounts with no fuss, if you aren't sure how to do that already.
The massive 250GB Western Digital drive was split nearly 50/50, with a 116GB FAT32 partition for Windows XP and all your installed applications, and a 114GB NTFS partition called BACKUP, for the rest of your data. It's a decent out of the box configuration for such a setup, but it would have been nice for Time to configure the main partition as NTFS as well, for all the benifits that gives you over FAT32.
The BACKUP partition holds a 2.8GB backup of the main partition, presumably for easy restoration in the event of a problem, but without all the manuals or CD's, I was unable to test that side of things. The rest of that partition is free for your own usage.
A small point, but the Windows XP installation files and certain setup files and folders that shouldn't have been visible or even there, post installation, were still on the disk. It's usually a sign that installation hasn't completed properly, since the installation program usually clears away those directories when it's finished, but everything operated fine.
In general, it was just a normal XP installation with no bells and whistles on Time's behalf. No elaborate setup wizards or hand holding, just a nicely tuned installation for the power user, the intended target audience.
As far as drivers go, the UltraStation shipped with the well known 44.03 Detonator XP driver set for the GeForce FX5900 graphics card. A fairly old version of the SoundStorm and nForce chipset drivers were used, there are 2 sets after the installed versions that Time could have installed, but chose not to. Maybe they were using an older install image, or just hadn't validated the new driver release for the MSI motherboard they choose to run.
However, the old chipset drivers didn't cause any problems in use, or cause any ill effects while benchmarking the system. Everything ran fine and appeared well setup.
Of course, Time have branded the My Computer properties panel with their own logo and support information, more on that later on.
I think it's about time we benchmarked it, to see if it performs like an XP3200+, GeForceFX 5900 128MB and nForce2 Ultra 400 should.
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