Days 4-7 Folding

I’m not going to be here during this week, so I have set Folding@home up to run continuously (hopefully). It is working on a unit that I am alredy part way through on Linux. So it should be easy to compare. Until then, bye bye.

Day 3, Why Don’t You Work?!

One little beef I have with Vista is the backwards compatibility, or lack thereof. Too many times have I been greeted with a wealth of error messages to do with some XP software I have, “Access Denied” being the most common. Well it wasn’t denied yesterday! Another one I love is “This install is corrupt” which implies that some time between my pressing “Shut down” and it finally turning off, some little Microsoft gremlins have invaded my application with a hex editor with the sole intention to make my experience as difficult a possible. Call me paranoid you may, but how else could a simple file become corrupt with a competent filesystem like NTFS? Unless NTFS isn’t as good as we would be led to believe. But then why would such a successful corporation such as Microsoft continue to use such a filesystem if it were so awful? Surely it can’t be arrogance? Well, it’s beyond me.

Vista also seems to insist that applications have stopped working when they clearly haven’t. Take the GIMP for example, here is a picture of what happens when I try to start a new document

As you can see it has fully rendered the window, and appears to be working fine. So, instead of letting me have the choice to keep the application open and investigate it myself, it forces the application to close. To which I yell at the screen “I KNOW BETTER NOT YOU! LET ME MAKE THE DECISIONS!” to which it stares blankly back. Evidently it can’t understand my British accent.

I have to hand it to Microsoft on one point though. They have coded the best feature imaginable into their latest offering. No it’s not a bash shell. With this new operating system, I can actually add hardware to my computer. Before installation I had no floppy drive. But now, as if by magic, I have one! The proof is in the pudding as it would seem as you can see in this tantalising screenshot

Now if only I could find the slot to put the diskettes in…

Day 2, Getting Settled

So I’m finally getting into the swing of things now. I know my way around the system now. That said, there’s not really a lot to learn. Vista is very beginner friendly. But is that necessarily a good thing? It really doesn’t cater for the ‘power user’ as it were. There’s no documentation, there’s no clue as to what any of the meaninglessly names files in the C:\Windows\ directory actually do. Another thing that surprised me is the lack of software that comes with Vista. There are 9 items in my Windows/Start menu. None of which I have any itention of using. On this menu I am again greeted with a whole host of buttons with hidden uses. But it’s not ’surprise and delight’ hidden uses, they are buttons that you’d expect to do something, then do something completely different. Take for instance this button:

You’d think it would bring up a menu for shutting down/logging off options, or at the very least turn the computer off. But no, they decided that the universal image for ‘power off’ won’t be used to turn off the computer instead it will, without warning, turn the screen off and leave the user sitting there feeling a little bemused.

What acutally happens when you press this magical button it “Saves your session and puts the computer in low-power state so you can quickly resume working”. How am I supposed to know that without holding my cursor over the button to find out what it does? How many people read the tooltip for what they assume would be to shutdown the computer? I know I don’t.

Despite the lack in software, I have still managed to fill up a quarter of my 80GB hard disk:

That’s 7.15GB of operating system (C:\Windows\) and the rest is stuff to make it bearable. Not really good going for just over 24 hours.

Day 1, Installation and First Impressions

First of all, I’m going to start on the box. It is the most over-engineered piece of packaging I have ever seen. Instead of opening it with a flap or another equally adequate way, it requires the brain power of ten men to realise it sort of swivels two sides simultaneously to reveal the treasure within. If you get Vista, I advise buying a hammer too.

Well here I am, installing Windows Vista. I have got to the EULA, which is proving to be an interesting read. I have to say it’s a far cry from “You are legally free to copy, modify and redistribute” Here are some choice points:

• On any version except Ultimate, you are not allowed to use more than two processor cores
• Two or more people can’t simultaneously use the computer
• You can’t share images and other media, eg., screenshots
• Any software Microsoft deem fit is allowed to store, and send data to MS
• You’re allowed to make one backup copy of the software. How nice.
• No more than 10 devices maximum are allowed to retrieve data from your computer

Now I’m past that, I have lovely options for partitioning. I have a wide choice of file systems, NTFS, NTFS or NTFS.

I’m warning all you pre-converters out there, this takes forever to do anything.

So, I boot up, login with a picture of a kitty and type my password and am greeted with a wealth of meaningless messages. So I get to work, installing drivers, putting the mouse tracking speed to a useable level, and setting my resolution properly. Well, in an ideal world that would have actually happened. First of all, drivers. I put in the disc for my wifi drivers go through the wizard, halfway through I get a lovely obtrusive popup saying that I need to install drivers for my wireless card. Duh! I then get a wealth of errors saying it’s not installed, when it evidently is. I proceed to install sound drivers, doesn’t work, doesn’t tell me why. Monitor drivers, perfect, I can now set my resolution to one that makes text become readable (please note, text is still not antialiased). Come on, drivers? For a monitor? This means that a 4:3 resolution is displayed on a 16:9 monitor. Yes, it is worse than you think it is.

Next thing on the list is system update, so I browse to the Windows Update tool select all 17 updates and proceed to download them. At the end I get a lovely bright red error message stating that 1 update failed to install. What it neglected to tell me was which update it was. User friendliness FTW

I think it’s safe to say that things aren’t going too well so far.

Right, that’s downloading updates crossed off my todo list. Well, sorta. I’ll put a star next to it. Heh.

Next is getting some useable applications, because Internet Explorer is, well, to be frank, it’s abysmal. Truly diabolical. But enough of that for now. I commenced the download of Firefox (BTW the first time it stalled indefinitely), downloaded Xchat, GTK+, and Gaim. Wonderful, now let’s get down to business. Wait, I have to restart, I must have installed a kernel update. No? Oh well.

After the lengthy restarting process I was again treated with an obtrusive popup about important errors on my computer, it’s been up and running for half an hour and this is my first fatal error. Good going Microsoft. So I was taken through some meaningless wizard and it fixed it, magically. Why it couldn’t just have a “fix” button is beyond me.

Now there’s some more interesting news. Vista appears to be restricting my bandwidth. It’s stalling downloads  indefinitely until I intervene. I didn’t see that in the EULA.

That’s as far as I’ve got now, more news as it breaks

Day <1

So here I am. At my computer typing my first and last blog post on Linux. I have just assured acquisition of a trial copy of Windows Vista Home Premium, which I will legitimately use for the allowed 30 day grace period. At the moment I am imaging my hard drive ready for Vista to plow straight over my partition table. Day one should be coming round shortly. Until then here are some specs to give an idea of what is expected:

• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4400+ clocking at 2420MHz
• GPU: BFG GeForce 7900 GT OC clocking at 475MHz with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM
• Motherboard: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
• HDD: 80GB SATA Seagate Barracuda
• RAM: 1GB DDR2 400MHz RAM
• Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 940BW WXGA (1400×900)