Windows Vista

My 'current' Vista Desk top

Vista

I don’t normally get on an OS bandwagon, in fact, I never have before and if I piss off a few people, well, then I piss off some people.

I have several computers in my household, four and a laptop. The laptop is for my wife and for the most part she is the sole user, except when she needs something new installed or a piece of hardware added. Three of the four desktops are all home made machines that I put together either by ordering the parts I selected or (in the case of the oldest one) one that is assembled from left over parts from upgrades from the other machines.

The Laptop runs Windows XP and I have it optimized for the way my wife uses it. It connects to our home network via a wireless Netgear card. She likes Internet Explorer (me thinks because that is what she is forced to use at work) so I have it set up as her default browser with all her favourite pages opening when she starts it up. It has Office 2000 installed (again, the version she uses at work) and I put icons on her ‘beach scene’ desktop so she can click on Excel or Word and have them pop up for her to use. She uses the laptop to pay bills online, and do a little on line surfing of a few sites. This is an older laptop with 1gig of ram and a 1.8mhz Celeron cpu and a 15” (and some fraction that I don’t remember) lcd screen with a 20gig hard drive. We have taken excellent care of it and it still works fine for what she does. I even used it when I was in the hospital with pneumonia.

As I mentioned, we have four desktop machines. The oldest one is a 900mhz Athlon cpu with 1gig of ram and a couple of matching 40gig hdds. It is mainly used by both of my stepdaughters for homework (yeah right), instant messaging, web surfing, video watching and playing some of their music. It runs Windows XP.

The next oldest machine is a 2.0ghz Athlon machine with 1gig of ram and a pair of matching 80gig hard drives. For a long time, I used this machine as a server for The Blood Pearls and as a backup for when Sunder went down. It has a great video card in it and it is a very fast machine. This one has Office 2003 installed as well as windows XP. The kids use this machine for their games as well as the other stuff I listed on the old machine. I need to mention that the older machine is basically only used when one of two are on this one.

The next machine is my gamer. It has a X64 Dual Core 2.2ghz Athlon with 1gig of ram and a pair of matching 120gig hard drives. This machine runs on Windows XP and has Office 2003 installed. This is my primary machine that I use for whatever including playing Mercs and Halo.

Lastly, the newest edition to our PC family is a store bought machine. Earlier this year, I came across a bargain that I could not pass up. I was looking to replace the oldest machine with an average Win XP machine so both girls could play their games and have nice machine to mess with. The 900mhz machine was struggling with some of their games and one or two simply wouldn’t play on it. As in the past, I was going to just build a new machine and load it with whatever they needed to make sure it could whatever they needed to do.

Well, I ended up buying a ‘pre-built’ machine pre-loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium. It was much cheaper than I could buy the components and another copy of Windows XP and build it myself so I figured wth. I had heard and read the horror stories about Vista and how so many web sites were saying all the bad stuff about Vista but I did it any way.

Let me set the record straight about a couple of things upfront. The machine I bought came with a Pent 4, 3.04ghz cpu, 1gig of ram and an integrated video chip. Before I made the purchase, I made the store open up the machine and confirm I could add a video card. I could and bought one with it at the same time I bought the computer. I also doubled the ram to 2gigs.

I have been running Vista now for 7 or 8 months without a blue screen or a single failure to run something I wanted to run. I added a separate video card (as mentioned) because an integrated video chip normally shares its ‘video memory’ with the system memory up to whatever the chip is rated for. This machine had a PCIe slot, so I bought a decent card for it and since I was inside the box, I went ahead and doubled the system memory. I had read that Vista runs good on 1gig but it runs ‘best’ on 2gigs. The store I bought the machine from was running a buy one get one free sale on memory so I bought the memory at the same time I bought the Video card and the machine.

Everything physically installed in a breeze and when I booted up to the cmos to disable the onboard video and verify that it recognized the new card and memory, the bios had already done what I went in there to do. I exited the bios and let it boot up.

Windows Vista is a lot different than XP and many things have had their ‘names’ changed or are in a different place than they were in XP. So yeah you might say I had a bit of a learning curve to ‘get used’ to it. Office and Works were pre-installed so all I had to do really was make sure my network saw it and that it saw my network and of course install Mercs (and hope Mercs Worked).

As I said, some of things were renamed or in different places so it took me a bit to ‘network’ it in with the rest of network, but I had no problems once I found out where things were or what they were now called. Once I connected, it joined right in and it could see the other machines and the network printer and the other machines could see it. Accessing was a little different. If you don’t put things in a ‘public’ folder, it comes up and asks you for a user name and password (that I didn’t remember setting up) and if you don’t get it right it wont let you at your data. On my second attempt, I used the name and password I used to set the machine up and boom I was in. I have since attached a 120gig external hard drive that contains all of our music files (mine, as well as the girls). I figured out how to ‘share’ it in a snap and it works fine for all on my network.

This new machine has one of those drives where you can plug in the memory card out of your camera, your phone or a portable music player and it reads the info and asks you what you want to do with it. This little drive works great. We have 4 different digital cameras in our family, all with those little micro disks, and the girls each have a digital music player. These plug in via a USB port. Again, these have plugged in and worked without even installed anything.

Our main ‘network’ printers work just fine. Yes, I had to download new drivers for them, but the drivers installed very easily and the printers have worked like new form all machines including the Vista machine. The Video Card I bought actually came with Vista drivers on the install disk, even tho I have since updated them, but it installed and worked flawlessly. My Nostromo worked when I downloaded Vista drivers as did my laser mouse.

In fact, the ONLY gripe I have had about installing software or hardware was with Creative, not Microsoft. Vista handles sound differently than any previous version of Windows. The machine I bought had a built in 7.1 surround sound ‘chip’ that worked very well and sounded really good, but, I have always been a big fan of Sound Blaster cards and each of my other machines had some version of a Sound Blaster in it. I decided to buy on for this one. I bought a card just like the one in my gamer because it sounded great and actually came with a very nice suite of software. ACKKK, some of the software on the install disk was not compatible with Vista even tho the box was labeled ‘Vista compatible’. After registering my product, I went to the download section to look for the ‘Vista versions’ of what I bought/came with my hardware. To my surprise, I only got partial compatibility and ‘all’ the stuff I thought I would have was not yet available for Vista. They did have drivers and some basic software and it did install on run perfectly but I was missing a few features. After several emails and a few phone calls I basically was told that Creative was working on it and as the software became available for Vista I would be notified.

More about Vista. Other than some of the Creative software, I have not found anything that I could not install or run on Vista that I wanted to. Everything just works. And it works easily and hassle free. Sure, there are the ‘security’ nags that pop up when you want to do certain things that require and ‘admin’ to say its ok, even if you are signed in as an admin, but other than that, everything just works and works well. Not only does it work, but it works very fast. All my applications ‘come up’ fast and even my gaming is smooth as glass. Mercs worked fine as does Halo and Freelancer. I don’t play many other games, but these work great, I don’t have any video issues or sound problems and I get good frame rates (for an average video card). Obviously, web surfing and email are no trouble, nor is watching TV. I have a lot of the ‘bells’ and ‘whistles’ turned on, like the Aero interface and the sidebar gadgets and I have had no trouble. The only thing that I have noticed to be unusual (at least to me) is the data transfer rate over my network. If I am transferring files or whatever from or to the Vista machine from any other AND I happen to turn on Windows Media Player, the transfer speed drops quite a bit, even if its not media files I am transferring and even if I am listening to local file rather than those on the external hard drive. I don’t know why it is, but if I turn off Media Player and leave it off or use a different media player, the transfer rate goes back up. Weird…

Many of the online magazines like CNet and ZDNet have ridden Microsoft pretty hard about Vista. Many say it just isn’t up to all that it was lead up to being. Maybe they are doing some things I don’t do. Maybe they are seeing something I don’t see. I have no gripes at all. In fact, I am considering purchasing another copy to upgrade my gamer rig. The bottom line is this, if you install the proper hardware and the proper drivers, at least for me, Vista is a nice, smooth and fast OS.

I like it and I have been and still am very happy with Vista. I don’t suggest changing from XP if you are currently happy with your XP machine(s). You do need the right hardware in the box. I mean, would you buy a Porsche and put a Briggs and Stratton motor in it? Probably not. I do not recommend an onboard video chip for a desktop, use a separate video card. I also suggest at least 2gigs of ram. Any of todays dual core (or even quad core) cpus will handle it and it should run with plenty of speed.

I am not an expert on computer OS’s. I am just an average user and a gamer. I like my machine to be trouble free and to be as fast as I can afford for them to be. My Vista machine fits those requirements and it does it all very well. Again, I am not suggesting you abandon your OS and go get Vista. If you like what you have and it works for you, good. If you are looking to build or buy a new machine Vista should be a consideration if you are going the Windows route as far as I am concerned.