Windows Vista Part II
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Ok. I know I went off on Vista a while back, and I am sticking to what I said because I’m stubborn like that. However, being I work in the education industry and Microsoft products account for around 98% of what I implement and support, I no longer have any excuses left to put off installing Windows Vista.
I have Windows Vista Enterprise Edition installed on my home machine, and I have to admit, it runs pretty well, although the memory usage is pretty heavy, and I have 4 Gb of RAM on this machine, of which just a tad under 3.5 Gb is actually being used by Windows Vista. I could of went x64, but I’ve heard horror stories about a serious lack of drivers, so I decided to stay away x64 for now.
Windows Aero? Ok, it looks nice and pretty, but what does it actually give me besides pretty “glass-like” effects and “flip 3D” all while using gobs of memory?
And why does my video system all of the sudden add shared memory to my BFG GeForce 7900 GT 256 Mb video card? What’s up with that crap? Shared memory for video is a disaster and why does Windows Vista do it? That’s total B.S. if you ask me.
I noticed that a lot of things take far less time to load, like Windows Live Writer for example. On my Windows XP build, it was an absolute dog when it came to the program load time. On Vista, it’s far, far faster. Got to be the enhanced index “superfetch” features, right?
Once I get used to Windows Vista more, I’ll have lots more to say about it. For right now, I like it, but it could be far better. My biggest pet peeve right now? I do not like how the task bar does not stretch to my second screen in my dual monitor layout. That sucks. Yes, I know there are third party solutions to solve the task bar issue, but shouldn’t Vista get it right in the first place?
What other Vista anomalies have you noticed? Please share. I’d like to hear about them.
5 Comments
marc klink
July 16th, 2007
at 9:00pm
I think if you look, that Live Writer is simply having many of the dll’s staying in memory, instead of unloading. I use it on an Athlon 1800+ and find no slow loading times. I believe this is due to the machine having 2GB of memory. Also, I use CacheMan which works better than Windows memory management alone.
I have a copy of Vista Business and found it to be really painful on a much faster machine with more memory. I have the benefits of Aero if I so desire by using third party software that doesn’t suck up memory just because it is available.
This is what few see about MS. Their coding style is designed to further the spiral of faster processors. What would be nice is that someone would wake up and see that many people buy faster computers to accomplish tasks quicker, the idea of the operating system and its processes being the bulk of processor time is not what I’m looking for, and I know many others who feel the same.
Dan
July 17th, 2007
at 9:56pm
Several PC-CD/DVD games copy protections break when running in xpsp2 compatibility mode.
Dan
July 17th, 2007
at 9:57pm
Oh, and my microphone doesn’t work.
Phil Pruchinsky
October 20th, 2007
at 5:41am
Vista Home Basic on an Athlon 2600 2.1 Ghz, 1gig ram,Asus A7NXE-Deluxe MoBo,Adaptec AHA-2940Au SCSI controller and a Toshiba SDM-1401 DVD-ROM derive.
The SCSI DVD drive ejects randomly occasionally producing a “DDE error”..I don’t have the exact verbiage of the error at this time but will write it down the next time it occurs. This doesn’t seem to cause problems with the system but is annoying. Any suggestions?
bradenmikael
October 20th, 2007
at 7:37am
Did you check the firmware of the SCSI card, to make sure it’s up to date? Also, make sure your motherboard drivers are up to date. That’s a good place to start.
And finally, I saw a computer which “ate” CD ROM drives, which ended up being a badly wired power outlet at the wall. Make sure the power coming from your wall outlet is clean. The aforementioned computer I worked on had a hot neutral, which was the case of all the problems. Sounds weird? Yes, but it happened.