Windows Vista
In keeping with my inability to stay still for long I went ahead an installed vista over my windows XP pro installation that had been working reasonably well for a number of years. I had installed a couple of beta versions but had been disappointed with the lack of support for my hardware. My PC is a homebrew system based on an
- ASUS 8N-SLI Nforce 4 motherboard AMD 3800+ dual core GE6800 256 mb card (after a saphire x800 card had burst into flames on install!) 2 GB Ram 3 HD of various sizes (left overs from pervious projects) Soundlabster Audigy Echo Audio Layla 3G IP4000 printer Epson 3490 scanner
My main dissapointment had been with the lack of support for my main soundcard (the echo audio) The plan was therefore to wait untill Echo released the vista drivers. Echo managed to release drivers on the day of Vista's release. So I decided to buy. The hurdle was deciding which version of vista I should buy. In the end I picked home premium as this was what the upgrade advisor said.
I figured I could upgrade to Ultimate online at a later date. The 1st dissapointment was when I tried to download from microsoft. I thought I was getting a good bargin by paying US dollars but I was unable to get it for the dollar price as I was in the UK. I therefore had to pay the rip off UK price of 149 compared to the dollar price of 159. Someone will have to explain this very slowly one day as I still can't grasp why there is this price differential in the UK. The install went well and was done in approx 1 hour. Most of hardware was detected and installed correctly but I still had to go an search for drivers for my scanner. Which apprently doesn't work with Vista but does if you just install the software. The soundcard works great as does the Audigy card (I'd been waiting for Vista as its sound capabilites in particular had been billed as a great leap forward - individual application volume controls and better quality etc) The big problem has been in the reliabiltiy of the system, its gradually got worsed as I've installed all the software I use on a day to day basis (as indicated by the wonderful system reliability monitor!).
< The other major annoyance are the security pop-ups every time you want to access the control panel etc (admittedly not as annoying as in one of the 1st beta's I tried), and the persistantly unknown hardware in device manager (which to be fair is probably an old Hauupage WinTV PCI card and a USB uno midi interface)
So 3 weeks on I'm slightly disspointed by the new OS but have had a number of teething problems I simply didn't have on the mac. Its looks great but I in the back of my mind I just thinks its unreliable and keep saving documents every 5 mins just in case. I think my next desktop computer will be a Mac!
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