nearly a victim of Vista
So I had the apartment to myself last night. I bullshat on the phone for awhile with Wester (my partner in crime over at Pfft, Science) about our year in review series and then proceeded to mess around with my computers. I got the wild thought in my head that I'd upgrade my main PC, Morbid Athlon (yeah, I name all of my PCs) to Vista from XP. I just got a new video card (GeForce 8800GT) and figured I'd give Vista a shot so I could take advantage of DirectX 10 features. The install didn't go so well. A Vista install that goes well takes hours anyway with the copying and unpacking of files being a long, painful, tedious process if you stare at your monitor while it's going on. Unfortunately, after the first reboot, when the REAL install begins, it kept erroring out. Thankfully it didn't completely clusterfuck my system and when I booted back into XP, everything was okay, the Vista installer recognized that it had failed and put everything back to it's prior state. Thankfully the Vista installer seems to be a little smarter than previous editions of Windows and it didn't completely wreck my system.
I'm certainly not trying to be a Microsoft apologist over here. I certainly don't agree with many things they do...but I also recognize that they produce a lot of great stuff. Their OS/Kernel engineers are definitely top notch and I'm sure the core of Vista is pretty fabulous. I really want it to be a GOOD OS. XP has been awesome but it's time to step up to the 64-bit realm...and Vista is where the future of PC gaming has to be.
Vista definitely has it's issues. UAC is stupid and a pain. It runs too slow. There's still plenty of things in it I haven't figured out how to do...but there's plenty of little things that I like...some of them are vague and I can't put my finger on. I definitely like how it handles hibernating on the laptop as compared to XP and it's definitely much prettier. The OS has got a much worse rap than it deserved...and honestly, the transition to XP back in the day wasn't totally smooth, either. The big difference is that people wanted to get away from the 95/98/ME series of operating systems (since they were all just MS-DOS with a pretty interface) and get to something NT based. Nobody is in a particular hurry to migrate away from XP because it's a good OS and people are comfortable with it.
Over the last 15 years or so Microsoft has done a nice, steady (yet slow) job of moving us from MS-DOS to NT based operating systems. The road hasn't always been smooth but it's been done in such a way that the life of our hardware, software, etc has been extended. If you step up to a 64-bit OS, you're not going to be able to run old 16-bit apps...but at that point isn't it time to upgrade? While it's easy to have issues with their business practices, defiance of standards, etc one should be impressed by a complicated piece of software (Windows) that runs on nearly infinite combinations of hardware. I've been using XP since it's launch and most serious OS problems I've had have come from HARDWARE problems, bad drivers, etc and not a flaw with the OS itself. Not to slight Apple and OS X in any way, but they have a much smaller challenge on their hands getting the OS running on a very limited, standardized set of hardware, so let's at least give MS kudos for that.
I'm certainly not trying to be a Microsoft apologist over here. I certainly don't agree with many things they do...but I also recognize that they produce a lot of great stuff. Their OS/Kernel engineers are definitely top notch and I'm sure the core of Vista is pretty fabulous. I really want it to be a GOOD OS. XP has been awesome but it's time to step up to the 64-bit realm...and Vista is where the future of PC gaming has to be.
Vista definitely has it's issues. UAC is stupid and a pain. It runs too slow. There's still plenty of things in it I haven't figured out how to do...but there's plenty of little things that I like...some of them are vague and I can't put my finger on. I definitely like how it handles hibernating on the laptop as compared to XP and it's definitely much prettier. The OS has got a much worse rap than it deserved...and honestly, the transition to XP back in the day wasn't totally smooth, either. The big difference is that people wanted to get away from the 95/98/ME series of operating systems (since they were all just MS-DOS with a pretty interface) and get to something NT based. Nobody is in a particular hurry to migrate away from XP because it's a good OS and people are comfortable with it.
Over the last 15 years or so Microsoft has done a nice, steady (yet slow) job of moving us from MS-DOS to NT based operating systems. The road hasn't always been smooth but it's been done in such a way that the life of our hardware, software, etc has been extended. If you step up to a 64-bit OS, you're not going to be able to run old 16-bit apps...but at that point isn't it time to upgrade? While it's easy to have issues with their business practices, defiance of standards, etc one should be impressed by a complicated piece of software (Windows) that runs on nearly infinite combinations of hardware. I've been using XP since it's launch and most serious OS problems I've had have come from HARDWARE problems, bad drivers, etc and not a flaw with the OS itself. Not to slight Apple and OS X in any way, but they have a much smaller challenge on their hands getting the OS running on a very limited, standardized set of hardware, so let's at least give MS kudos for that.