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Our little railway consisting of the excellent Lego ICE train set has recently been expanded to include a cargo train with a number of coaches. The Cargo Train Deluxe set #7898 contains a fair number of pieces and components. Over the course of a couple of evenings, a rather eager four year old got to piece together first a coach, then truck and car. Dad had to step in to assist with the completion of the forklift and locomotive.

There are 856 pieces in the box – in our case only 855: an errant light gray grill seems to have gone AWOL. I’ve never had a box of Lego with a piece missing, so I have to assume that this was overlooked in one of the plastic bags or may have been misplaced. It’s a reasonably critical component, fitting on the outside edge of the floor in the middle of the cargo car’s interlocking doors. Without the grill in place, the doors swing open wildly, spilling cargo on the tracks – not as dramatic as that, but it can be a dramatic affair for a four year old train driver going full tilt… Thankfully, we had a spare on hand and were able to save the day.

A radio control unit is provided that is coded to one of three channels or a special, fourth channel that covers the first three channels. Hence, up to three trains can be piloted individually or a single remote can control all trains at once – handy for playing a few tricks on unsuspecting controllers. The locomotive features working headlights, though only on one side. With the ICE, the lighting up of both the driven unit and the second head unit would have been difficult and the inclusion of a power source for a light would have been too costly. The locomotive in this set could easily have been provided with a second light unit as the motor can easily share its power for another bulb.

Together, the locomotive and remote consume nine AA batteries. We still need to tag one remote with a white brick and one with a green one to clearly indicate which one belongs to which train.

Once constructed, there’s a fair amount of rail for the long train that comprises a green locomotive, cargo car with doors on either side and a tipper car for hauling coal. The crane on rails has been designed to operate in conjunction with a flatbed, allowing a car or pallets to be loaded and offloaded. A nice feature are the extending stabilizing arms that swing out from beneath the crane car to enable heavy loads to be lifted without the train tipping over. A small truck is provided to cart pallets around. The forklift does the heavy lifting and a railroad crossing is provided. When all wagons are attached to the locomotive, the entire train is almost 90cm long.

We’ve combined the ICE train’s rails with the ones in this set and have added quite a number of additional switches (#7895) and curved and straight track (#7896) segments to provide sidings and alternate routes. Soon, we’ll be adding a train station, harbour and bridge.

The Lego trains are highly recommended – great fun during construction and even more fun to be had when two trains try to avoid each other on a convoluted railroad…

I was intrigued to try the boot speedup tweak for Vista that I’ve heard about. So, I set aside a few minutes of my hectic schedule to do some impromptu lab work

By default, settings for the operating system allow it to use only one processor or core upon system startup. If you have a Core 2 Duo chip in your system, for example, Vista won’t switch over to both cores until the boot process is completed. For systems with even more cores, such a switch over could be thought to have serious performance implications for the boot process. Or does it?

My G2S has a Core 2 Duo chip installed. From a cold start to the Vista logon screen appearing, I measured 46 seconds. Once I’ve typed my password in, getting the desktop and startup programs set up does take the system a significantly longer time. It’s not so easy to measure that time because it’s dependent on networks and the like. For the next part of the experiment, load up msconfig from the Run menu. In the System Configuration, select the Boot tab.

Click the Advanced options button. By default, the number of processors defaults to 1.

Click the checkbox and select the maximum.

Now shutdown and restart in anticipation… I measure 46 seconds! An improvement of absolutely zero from a cold start to the logon screen. That makes sense: G2S spends at least 10 seconds waffling through its BIOS bootstrap. Give the OS, any OS, at least some time to find its bootsector and start reading the bootloader from disk into RAM. Then let it boot. It should be clear that increasing the number of processors is not a great help if the main load is based on disk access.

Without a fixed measurement, it’s difficult to quantify the length of time it now takes all the applications to load once the desktop is up. I’m inclined to think that the time taken by the system to complete a startup after I’ve completed the logon has decreased, but that’s a very subjective statement.

Try it out and let me know – I’m keeping the setting on 2 CPU’s simply to get a feeling for the machine’s speed once the logon process is completed. But don’t buy the fact that this tweak will speed up your boot times to any huge degree.

I’ll ignore the Maximum memory setting…