Category: Windows

Windows Vista

Newegg has a nice page on Windows Vista. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to upgrade my home desktop PC to Vista or not. I think it meets the required specs, but I’m not sure how well it’ll work. If I can manage to supress my natural upgrading urge for a few months, that would probably be best. By April, there will probably be some decent new video cards that are definitely Vista compatible, and maybe they’ll even have stable drivers by then. I have a pretty decent AMD processor in my machine, but it’s not dual core, so that might be a problem. I really don’t want to go out and buy a new motherboard and processor any time soon. And I really don’t want to buy a completely new machine either.

maintenance

For some reason, installing my new keyboard today got me started looking at certain things on my PC and applying some upgrades. First, I upgraded the drivers for my video card, since I discovered that I’d been getting some weird messages in the event log related to my video card. Then, I remembered that I hadn’t gotten around to installing SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, so I went ahead and did that too. Both of those things are pretty big installs, so that killed about four hours, between downloading and installing. Maybe I should consider doing a year-end backup tomorrow, too.

goodbye Vista

I decided to give up on Vista for now. I restored the backup of my original XP install on my laptop. (Done with Acronis True Image, by the way.) I think if I had a much more powerful laptop, the Vista beta might be usable, but it’s just too slow on a 2-year-old Gateway machine, with 512 MB of RAM and a low-end video card.

I am still looking forward to the final release of Vista, but I doubt I’d upgrade either my desktop or laptop to Vista; I’ll need to wait until the next time I buy new machines.

User Access Control (UAC) in Vista

One of the most annoying things about Vista so far is the plethora of UAC prompts. I thought I’d try to figure out how to turn off the warnings on CA’s anti-virus software, since a couple of these come up every time I start the computer. Apparently, it’s all or nothing right now — there’s no way to turn off the prompts for individual programs. (See this thread for some discussion on that.) If I was using Vista on my normal home computer, I’d probably get about 10 or 20 of these, given all the programs that load on startup.

Windows Vista

I installed Windows Vista beta 2 on my laptop last night. I decided to try an upgrade install, which took quite a long while, and left me with a pretty slow and weird system. In particular, the wireless networking didn’t work at all right. (I hadn’t really expected much from that, but I thought I’d try it.)

I punted and did a clean install today, and that went a lot faster and has left me with a much more stable system. I had some inital problems with the wireless card recognizing my Airport Express base station, but it seems to be working now. (It’s an Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 3B Mini PCI.)

I also signed up for CA’s eTrust Anti-Virus free one-year trial subscription for Vista beta users. My usual AV software, F-Prot, probably doesn’t work in Vista.

Since I did a clean install, I don’t have any other software loaded yet. I may try the Office 2007 beta, or I may just stick with Office 2003. I’m not sure on that yet.

My laptop barely meets the requirements for Vista, so I’ve got none of the funky Aero Glass stuff going on; just the basic interface. It looks nice enough for now.

Assuming the system remains at least borderline usable, I’ll leave Vista on the machine and play around with it a bit over the next few weeks.

Nero

I just bought the newest version of Nero from Best Buy. As with a lot of software that comes out these days, it seems to be a bit bloated with unnecessary features, and it (of course) wants to take over nearly every file type imaginable. Really, I just want decent software for burning CDs and DVDs. I don’t need ANOTHER music player or photo organizer! On the plus side, it does come with a nice video player that does a decent job of playing DVDs. (My DVD drive didn’t come with decent DVD software, strangely enough.)

New computer guts

I went ahead and ordered a bunch of new parts for my computer from Newegg today. I’m getting a new motherboard, processor, video card, DVD burner, power supply, memory, and hard drive. Hopefully, good enough to hold me for the next three years. (The last time I did this was in late 2002.) I should be OK for Vista, too, whenever that comes out. (I checked the compatibility list for video cards, and I’ve got one that should work with all the new fancy Vista graphics stuff.) Let’s hope all the parts play well with each other, and I don’t break anything trying to put it all together.