Vista Sucks

[Commander Taggart]

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[Darth Marley]

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[StarshipTrooper]

Hi,

Well, I installed the brand-new Service Pack 1 this weekend, and of course it broke my Vista system. So I had to re-install Vista from scratch followed by SP1 followed by all my other software. Remember my favorite analogy for Vista: that of the psycho ex-girlfriend! Pretty to look at, but something entirely different on the inside.

Regards,

Nathan

[Squonk63]

No desire to go to Vista anytime soon. I'll happily stay in XP country while awaiting my iMac with OS X. Vista may be prettier, but I'll take more stable every time.

[Gemini1999]

I guess that I'm in the minority - I've got Vista on my laptop that I bought last summer and I've never experienced any problems. I didn't really have a choice at the time that I bought it as the problems people have been experiencing hadn't really cropped up in large numbers yet.

Not that it's needed, I still have my desktop PC that has XP on it anyways.

Bryan

[Warrior]

I got stuck with Vista on my new PC when I bought it last year.

It does suck, and it doesn't look pretty.

[StarshipTrooper]

Hi,

Vista definitely looks good, but that's about all it has going for it. It ain't no OS X, but Aero Glass gives Aqua a run for the money. I do like Vista's transparent window frames better than Mac's graphite window frames, however.

Regards,

Nathan

[Martok2112]

I've rarely had probs with Vista on my new rig. I think largely the problems lie with computers that had Vista installed on them after-market. But PC's with Vista pre-installed seem to run alright.

[StarshipTrooper]

Hi,

Well, my PC is going on 2 years old, so that could be part of the problem. But it's a dual-core 3.00GHz Pentium D with 2.0GB RAM and the nVidia card has 256MB, so I would be surprised if the semi-old hardware is causing the problems. The worst culprit so far has been Audible.com's software. After installing that, my Vista system promptly crashed. However my 3 month Audible subscription is done and I've downloaded the audiobooks to my iPod, so hopefully Vista won't have to be re-installed nearly as often. As for Service Pack 1, it's working good so far with Vista Ultimate. The trick was to download it after a clean install of Vista with none of my other software installed.

Regards,

Nathan

[Darth Marley]

If you are playing deep with Microsoft products, you should grab the Sysinternals Suite, and run their process monitor and explorer to get a feel for what is choking your system.

[StarshipTrooper]

Hi,

Actually, I just installed that suite on Monday with my other software. I haven't run any of the programs in the suite yet, but hopefully that will help diagnose the problem.

Regards,

Nathan

[Darth Marley]

There are video tutorials available on Canadian sites that go over it, but they are from the era before Microsoft bought them out, and filemon and regmon were separate tools.

Setting up procmon and getting the filters to produce useful output may require some reading.

But process explorer is useful as a task manager replacement right away.

The next step in Win-Fu is to get the symbol tables and a kernel debugger installed so you can read crash dumps.

[CaptainTux]

With the new version of Ubuntu Linux coming out in a few weeks, it is not easier than ever to install it on a partition on your vista machine to kick the tires a bit. :):) I have been using nothing but Linux since 2004 and am not missing anything.

[Darth Marley]

Ubuntu is indeed a breeze to install. Xubuntu for older, less robust machines will charm a little more life out of them with less GUI overhead. Kubuntu is the version with the KDE interface, which Mac users would probably prefer.

Frankly, it is easier to install and maintain than Windows.

The only weak point in Ubuntu is the fact that most USB wireless cards only have Windows drivers. There is a solution to this, and following the provided walkthrough on the install disc will solve the problems. If you can read and follow instructions, you can make such cards work under Ubuntu.

Best of all, with Linux there is a ton of free quality software available.

The only things that keep me from kissing XP goodbye are:

1) My capture card has no Linux drivers that I have found (cheap ass NEC MPG tuner). Though I have not grepped the source code to check by PCI number yet.

2) Even if that card worked, there are no free TV schedules available anymore. This is a crime. Once MythTV started using zap2it's schedule, they caught on and quit providing it for free. M$ Media Center has a free schedule downloader. It uses encrypted XML, and I think the decryption key has been published, so in theory, one could (illegally) export the encrypted XML, and decrypt it, and try to strip the MCE flags from that database. But I would much rather just see free XML schedlues available, like there are for the rest of the world.

3) Games. And there are only two games I need to work. The Half-Life 2 family of games, including Portal and TF2, are said to work under Wine. But since I have not banged out the issues with Civ4 not displaying properly, I am not getting in to that can of worms.

The biggest issue with the Linux community is that they have a terrible notion of what documentation should look like. The typical Linux documentation assumes far too much knowledge. The case of a reasonable proficient computer user such as myself failing to get the published instructions for running Civ4 under Wine to work bears this out. There is a ton of stuff they leave out, and assume the user already knows.
Sure, that problem is true of any field that builds upon prior knowledge. But the Linux documentation is just not up to par yet.

Ubuntu documentation for installing that distro rocks though. All of it is on the disc, and "just works."

It is the documentation for the "free software" that sucks in most cases.

[CaptainTux]

1 and 2 are not issues for me. I like my tivo. Yeah, I could build my own, but it is a good value and there are some nice hacks I can do to it.

3 is not an issue. I am not much of a gamer save my playstation.

Documentation is an issue. However, the Ubuntu Wiki doc is better than most and if you are still stuck, there are some good forums and some good newbie friendly mail lists. I like books too. When I help someone switch to Linux I usually get them a Marcel Gagne' book.

[CaptainTux]

Side note, in less than 24 hours, a Asus Eee PC will be coming my way with Linux pre installed. :)

[Darth Marley]

TiVo runs Linux!

Very little of the TiVo box is proprietary.

What cheeses me off is that "they" are once again charging for what was once free, meaning the program schedule.
The missing drivers I can cure. I could buy a card that is supported. But the schedule data no longer being free is a corporate conspiracy.

The Wine/gaming issue is a documentation issue, plain and simple. If someone plainly told me what bit to twiddle, I would stop complaining.

The Vista rejection is a boom for the Unices. Mac gets part of that pie, but Ubuntu will also get a boost.
It is an excellent way for someone new to Linux to get exposed to it.

[CaptainTux]

I find it interesting that the game makers rely a lot on FOSS tools and do not help with the wine efforts. They could. Case in point...Googles Picassa and GoogleEarth worked WITH the wine developers and installation is a breeze on a Linux box. Truth be told, I do not see gaming in Linux and Macs catching up for some time. If gaming is important to you, at this time, Mac and Ubuntu is not the way to go.

[Darth Marley]

It is just a matter of DirectX being "popular" with developers.

Consoles are just a means of copy protection for the game houses.
Computers are a superior platform for games.
As the next generation of graphics hardware incorporates ray tracing, the question is; Will there be an open source RT command set before DirectX11 hits the market?

[CaptainTux]

Short answer....prolly not.

[Senmut]

I got Vista on the laptop, and it has been a total screw. So much of my old software either won't load, or makes it crash.
DIE, BILL GATES! DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!