my Vista experience
Well, I guess it will surprise at least a few people out there that I’m actually testing Vista at this moment. But… next to everything I do on this site I also still have some professional duties and it is expected that I at least know some about it. Next to that, I’ve been critical about Vista in the past and as you know, it’s quite easy to be critical, but a lot harder to be correct. Sooooo… to be totally correct I’ve ordered an upgrade late December and somewhere last week I got my official copy in the mail…
Now I didn’t decide quite yet on what kind of hardware I was going to run this (heck, I didn’t even make up my mind if I was going to run this at all or just burn my copy or hang it on the wall). Well, yesterday my old media center was starting to act up on its XP MCE-install so I thought this was a good time to finally make up my mind. I downloaded an Upgrade Advisor and to my surprise, my 3 and a half year old media center passed the test?!?! Well, once again, hats off to the still brilliant ATI 9700 PRO which even seems able to run the Aero desktop (it needs a pixel shader 2.0 and yes, this old card has just that), how about that? ^_^
if you think it’s funny to see this on a Mac SE, here’s how
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So, decisions had been made, I decided to give this a go on my current hardware (although without activating it just yet, this gives me 30 days to really make up my mind, I guess). Honestly I must say that the installation wasn’t at all bad (as an upgrade started from XP, although I opted for a fresh install) and the machine was up & running on Vista in no time. But when I found out that I had no sound and it gave me an alert that there are no Soundstorm-drivers for Vista either, I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t thought of that before.
Anyway, first of all I think it’s a shame that NVidia aren’t releasing drivers for either NForce2 or Soundstorm for Vista. Of course I understand they stopped selling it a long time ago, but still, this could very well be the reason I never buy a motherboard with NVidia chipset again. I’d rather pay more as long as I know it’s supported for as long as it’s technically viable and it seems (yes, to my surprise too) that this old NF2-motherboard is quite capable of running Vista at this moment, so no reason there. So much for customer satisfaction.
But when searching for a solution, I was reintroduced with the magical compatibility mode of Vista (“it’s a brand new OS” “written from scratch!” “your old drivers still work!” “uh?”) and yes, when I ran the installer on compatibility mode and after that let the system run the NVmixer-application in compatibility mode also, it all works! magic!
installing NForce-drivers in compatibility mode
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Now, somehow this started to smell… I mean, I watched a movie last night on this setup and the sound works flawlessly… That’s good of course but I started to have my doubts on how ‘new’ and ‘from scratch’ this OS really is… The Media Center setup is 98% the same from the old one, except it looks a little fancier. Today I’ve been playing around to get more settings done to the system and 9 out of 10 dialogs are the same too… It’s too bad I can’t remember a spelling mistake somewhere in one of the XP-dialogs cause I was willing to bet whatever on it that it would still be there. ^_^
They can tell me a whole bunch of stuff about Vista. They probably started from scratch as a first step, but they probably copy-pasted all of the XP-code in there as a step two. (and that was probably already in their third try to get it right) This isn’t a new OS after all…
Now when you think about that, they really should be ashamed of themselves over at Redmond. They took six years to come up with something which is generally the same, it only looks a little fancier (but imho gets beat by Beryl) and got a whole lot more bloated… Now on the one hand I’m glad I didn’t (have to) buy new hardware for this. Although I’m going to put some extra memory in there and a cheap USB-stick for this other magical trick, Ready Boost.
Vista’s idea of security. Now who clicked on ‘change settings’, was it you or was it an intruder? Go figure it out, Einstein ...geez…
And then they enlighten us with splendid results last week, For the quarter ended March 31, Microsoft’s profit jumped 65 percent to $4.93 billion... as if they succeeded… Well, the shareholders will be happy (maybe?) but imho they failed miserably. I really can’t grasp the fact how you can spend six years and come up with this?!?! There simply is no innovation, nothing, nada, it’s the same old thing, only you need a faster PC to run it. But that same PC could run XP or Ubuntu a whole lot better than Vista can… So, I truly hope that next to Dell, other big manufacturers will also keep offering XP as an alternative and keep insisting on it. I guess when the other big boys in this industry do the same, it’s going to be quite difficult for Microsoft to kill XP after all…
I never have been a big Dell-fan, but the latest slashdot-headlines make me smile:
Dell To Offer Win XP On Consumer PCs Again
Michael Dell Using Ubuntu Linux At Home
Dell to Sell Machines with Ubuntu Pre-Loaded
...and Microsoft deserves it. They had six years and they failed. Still, somehow I think Vista is cute. Cute like when your little two-year old nephew tries to draw you a picture and it looks like shit. You smile. Somehow I’m having fun with it, but luckily I don’t have to work with it day in day out. It’s bloated like a mofo, but I guess I never had a fancier firmware for my VCR. *^_^*
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How about letting ubuntu to try out media center role? Freevo or mythtv should work at least as good as MCE. http://freevo.sourceforge.net/ and http://mythtv.org/
Oh sure, honestly, when you would’ve told me three years ago I would still be using XP MCE as of yesterday, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I tought I would’ve switched to an open source alternative earlier on. But, after I’ve gone to all the trouble (I started with early betas which were horrific) of XP MCE, it simply worked for me and so does this, well, sort of and for now ;-) All I do on this system is watch TV and some movies…
In the mean time the open source alternatives can become better and better, I’m not sure which one it was, but I saw a video of one distribution where you can navigate with a gyro-mouse. Now if someone changes that gyro-mouse into a wii-controller, I’m the first one to change :-)
Also, on another note, this is a system which just has to work for me, nothing more nothing less. The part that has kept me on Windows for now for this has been Soundstorm. I’m not eager to step back to something without hardware Dolby Digital encoding. So as soon as there are linux-drivers for whatever hardware DD-encoding, I will be eager to switch over.
In the mean time I can get to know Vista a little better and it’s knowledge I somehow need to know because of some professional duties I have.
and as a last one, I somehow like to have multiple OSes around...
You’re so right about Vista. I’ve used it for one week, then dumped it again in favour of XP. Wanna know why? I had installed the 64bit version for maximum performance. Well, Vista ran quite fast, but then I decided to upgrade my videodrivers. As soon as I did that, for some reason Vista was unable of running 64-bit software anymore. It kept yelling there was a .dll missing. Ofcourse I copied the .dll (which was indeed missing) back to it’s original location, but that didn’t help. I still only could run the 32-bits Internet Explorer, and all other programs and drivers wouldn’t work any more. I didn’t wanted to spend hours trying to figure out what caused that error, so I just formatted the Vista partition and reinstalled Xp. Which (for me) works flawlesly since SP2.
The only reason I can think of to switch to Vista is DX10. Since I use my computer mainly for gaming, I will have to switch to Vista, whether I want to or not…I will simply need it to be able to run DX10 games.
Unless someone makes a hack available which allows me to run DX10 on Windows XP, then there is no reason at all to switch to Vista. (I know there is a “hack” avaible already for XP, but that hack doesn’t give you a 100% DX10 support…)
Bottomline: Vista sucks.
>You’re so right about Vista.
Thank you!
>The only reason I can think of to switch to Vista is DX10.
Yeah well, don’t get me started… One thing I forgot is the drama of remote controlling this Vista PC… They somehow figured Remote Desktop isn’t something a home user needs, so it’s only available in Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions… (while it was available in XP MCE) *sigh* Anyway, so I thought, let’s step back to VNC then… Well, that only seems to work in user-mode and not in service-mode. Service-mode enabled me to log in remotely, but in user-mode, it’s only available *after* logging in… And then, when this security-pop-up comes up (from the screenshot) whenever you try to configure something from a distance it drops all connections *sigh*
I mean, this really is something they have crafted meticulously over the last six years, don’t you think?
And about DX10… Well, there’s no need for it to run on Vista alone, I’m pretty sure. So, in an ideal world, the best thing that could happen would be…. the big manufacturers start insisting on XP to be delivered for a long time to come and after that, the videocard-manufacturers start insisting on DX10 to be released on XP. Keep dreaming, I know. But why would the softwaremaker be in charge? They fail time after time, so it’s time for someone else to take charge, right?
Great presentation of Vista – and i totally agree with you about the unsupported Nforce boards.. No idea in it passing the requirements if the drivers are outdated and unsupported!
Oh and btw, yes i didn’t mean to be positive saying “great presentation of Vista”, as i totally agree in the fact that Vista sucks!
mine installed really quickly but took an age on the first boot up – I thought it’d crashed!
Compatability mode was the only thing that made my brief vista experience work – I used it for my wireless drivers and for itunes, didn’t use vista for anything else! It died anyway so I went back to XP – after a few weeks of kicking ubuntu!
I dumped windows before i had the chance to try out vista, I am now running ubuntu full time, and will soon be building a new system (processor and mobo in the mail as i speak), and this system will be running Ubuntu with beryl or compiz. I tried beryl and compiz on my laptop however i was faced with the sad truth that amd drivers really DO suck…it was a sad day.
Why did I have to smile when I reead this ^^
I only had a chance to try the Beta but what you write there is exactly what I thought of it. Only difference would be that drivers were even crappier back then.
hi there – i am maybe Off Topic, but I need some help. I bought dell inspiron 6400 with Vista preinstalled, but I want to install UBUNTU on it, having also Vista on the same drive. Can You give me any links to web pages with help, how to do it??? thank you in advance.
As bad as vista is, it’s still better than Linux. any form of Linux is for masochists.
you’ve got your hopes set on some kind of flamewar? ;-)
if this is really what you think, I can only feel sorry for you, really. What you say compares to driving a Dodge, claiming it to be the best car out there (since you never drove any other brand) and also refusing to drive any other brand. Well, good luck to you and your OS…
I messed around with a new Vista-capable laptop and eventually settled on dual-booting XP and Vista from separate partitions. Install XP on first partition, then install Vista on second partition. It automatically creates a boot menu.
The problem I have now with Vista is that when a program crashes, it reboots the machine. Great job, Microsoft.
I had high hopes for Ubuntu but was really disappointed when my laptop had no sound, video, networking, etc. This was with the newest release. I may give Fedora a try on another partition if it has better driver support.
dude i totally agree, mfcrs should allow XP as their main deal, this kiss-ass microsoft puke should be disavowed by any mfcr. bloated is so adequate for commercials that promise some zen-like nirvana from this pile of shit
I never had high hopes for Vista, but since I’m runing Ubuntu and XPx64, I thought I’d give it a try on an external hard drive. You can imagine my suprise when vista informed me it can’t install on a USB (ubuntu can for sure, I think XP can, too)... That’s pretty much my experience with Vista, I got mad when it refused to install through USB and decided the experiment wasn’t worth messing up my partitions.
Watch out with insulting your little nephew. I happen to know his father, he better not hear it.
I think u can try http://linuxmce.com for your media center. Vista really sucks ;)