A Windows Vista Story

Lockergnomie Jerry Whelan claims he’s a “fossilized geek from digital Jurassic Park,” but he’s lived to tell the tale of his move to Windows Vista:

I hated Windows Vista when I BitTorrented its betas and RCs, and it certainly performed an unnatural act on my hard drive every time I tried to remove it and delete the partition. But I have it now in the official Home Premium version, as my only OS, and I’m beginning now to feel a little old-time revival spirit (but minus 160 bucks, sucked from my veins).

I understand now what is going on - Vista has its new internal engines, different from the rapidly dead-ending code of XP, and is built for future expansion, with a thousand little sockets that can accommodate the new technologies that MSoft programmers are apparently already glimpsing.

You were right, the built-in drivers are great, except for my Audigy 4 sound card and my MIDI interface, which Vista could not supply because these two devices need ultra specific drivers. The Audigy driver is the usual deeply occult Byzantine mystery from Creative, and the MIDI interface driver is unavailable yet (HOW could they miss the deadline?). My synthesizer plays along fine for a minute and then unleashes demonic howls as the old driver fails under Vista. My musical compositions sit on the shelf waiting for some Japanese programmers to get off their butts and upload the damned driver.

If Vista seems pretty slow, I guess I have myself to blame for not getting dual-processors, but first they will have to do something about reducing the CPU current drain because I can’t have my computer maxing out the poor little 15 amp wall outlet. For now I will do a Ready Boost with an Apacer 2G thumb drive, which is said to be a fast one. Maybe it will help.

I have made the transition and I am happy now with Vista, and I am looking back on XP with zero nostalgia. All my programs run with the exception of my favorite little utilities, most of which are a little wonky and a couple of which have taken a crap completely. HOW can they miss the deadline? When I was a programmer in the mid-1960s I would have lost my job for not producing the newly compiled program deck on the appointed day. Yes, I said deck - IBM punched cards to load the program into the 1401 computer through a card-reader. We had to work with 16K of memory, not 16 Mega anything, but16 thousand magnetic core memory positions, and the memory cabinet was as big as a washing machine. We thought it was a huge deal when the IBM system 360 came in, with 64K of memory.

[tags]vista, vista upgrade, vista home, vista business, vista ultimate, windows vista[/tags]