Ramblings, opinions, and general meanderings from the Deep South

Monday, May 21, 2007

Windows Nazis, Flame On!

Windows Vista ate Sunday. Ever since the initial installation Windows Media Player 11 has been weird. Now it is just a light show and efforts to make it stable are over. If you are using Nvidia products be very careful about upgrading drivers. After several hours of manipulating, the older drivers are now re-installed and the machine is once again usable. Initially there was a nightmare with the audio drivers, but that was child's play compared to yesterday's adventure.

The SLI configuration has never been right. Who knows? May be a user issue and not Windows. The CPU stays at 100% usage if Guild Wars is running. Machine functions okay, but why this high percentage? Memory usage was reduced from 35% to 26% (when idle) by turning off unecessary services running in the background. Please realize that this operating system is using half a gig of RAM for something when it sits supposedly doing nothing The network card drivers have to be completely re-installed at least once a week. Do I format the hard drives and do a fresh installation or purchase another copy of XP and put Vista on the shelf for a while?

Time is too valuable to have a part time job with Microsoft alpha testing their new OS especially since the pay is zilch. They need to lay off the opensource people about patent violations and "fix" their latest product now being forced on the public. My opensource PCs, Linux and FreeBSD, have no problems. Might be a good idea if Microsoft asked for their help instead of making efforts to sue them. This is all very frustrating.

Save your money for now and stick with Windows 2000 or XP unless purchasing a new computer. Be sure and don't purchase Vista Home Basic. It really has issues. Folks this is real life. Most of us don't have the time to patch and shore up our PCs every day. It is probably a good plan to put Vista aside instead of running hot and cold all the time. I really want to like this product. Wish the report could be better, but so it goes...

"There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time."
~Napoleon I, Maxims, 1815

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