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Adventures with Vista
Posted on 2008.09.06 at 21:49
The power supply blew out on my main computer last night. It had been flaking for a couple of days, making all kinds of bad noises and it finally died last night. Since I am in the middle of a couple of scoring projects I need to work on over the weekend, I couldn't wait to get a new power supply from Dell, so I trotted off to MicroCenter just before it closed and got a new CPU. Yay.
My first thought was to just take the drives from the old machine and put them in the new one... but Microsoft didn't like that and wanted me to re-activate Windows XP... except I had an OEM version of XP that had been pre-installed by Dell, and apparently this is a big no-no with Microsoft. Oh, well. So I put back in the original system drive, and resigned myself to using Vista Home Premium 64-bit and started copying stuff from my old drive (not much, luckily, I kept most of the important stuff on a data drive and just installed that drive in the new machine).
The first annoying thing was the UAC, darn near everything I clicked on sent me through a series of dialogs so I could deal with permissions on certain files. Argh. Drove me nuts. I guess it's a good thing that Vista is super paranoid by default for the typical home user but it's a serious PITA for the power user (I am told Windows Server 2008 is the opposite and makes a decent workstation for the power user in that regard). I am used to Linux keeping a keyring of sorts so when you gain admin rights once it keeps it available for your login session so you don't have to go through the dialog maze. Actually, in Linux, I'd just go into a shell and use sudo to change permissions as needed. Oh well.
Lots of other annoyances, but nothing too horrible yet. All of my 32-bit software works fine, so far, especially the important stuff like Overture, Philkarmonik (and similar IK Multimedia plugins) and Reaper. I wanted to try out the 64-bit version of Reaper, but it only supports 64-bit plugins. Oh well.
Vista is OK eye candy wise, and with a pretty powerful machine (I got a 4G machine with a Dual Core 2.4GHZ CPU), I don't really notice any performance issues. Of course, I turned off Aero and went with the classic Windows 2000 look just to see how it compared and it just screamed :-) It's kinda funny that Windows is just now doing stuff that window managers for X (like Enlightenment) have been doing since the late 90s.
Still, I'd rather be using Linux, but the art and music software I use almost daily don't have equivalents under Linux. :-(
My first thought was to just take the drives from the old machine and put them in the new one... but Microsoft didn't like that and wanted me to re-activate Windows XP... except I had an OEM version of XP that had been pre-installed by Dell, and apparently this is a big no-no with Microsoft. Oh, well. So I put back in the original system drive, and resigned myself to using Vista Home Premium 64-bit and started copying stuff from my old drive (not much, luckily, I kept most of the important stuff on a data drive and just installed that drive in the new machine).
The first annoying thing was the UAC, darn near everything I clicked on sent me through a series of dialogs so I could deal with permissions on certain files. Argh. Drove me nuts. I guess it's a good thing that Vista is super paranoid by default for the typical home user but it's a serious PITA for the power user (I am told Windows Server 2008 is the opposite and makes a decent workstation for the power user in that regard). I am used to Linux keeping a keyring of sorts so when you gain admin rights once it keeps it available for your login session so you don't have to go through the dialog maze. Actually, in Linux, I'd just go into a shell and use sudo to change permissions as needed. Oh well.
Lots of other annoyances, but nothing too horrible yet. All of my 32-bit software works fine, so far, especially the important stuff like Overture, Philkarmonik (and similar IK Multimedia plugins) and Reaper. I wanted to try out the 64-bit version of Reaper, but it only supports 64-bit plugins. Oh well.
Vista is OK eye candy wise, and with a pretty powerful machine (I got a 4G machine with a Dual Core 2.4GHZ CPU), I don't really notice any performance issues. Of course, I turned off Aero and went with the classic Windows 2000 look just to see how it compared and it just screamed :-) It's kinda funny that Windows is just now doing stuff that window managers for X (like Enlightenment) have been doing since the late 90s.
Still, I'd rather be using Linux, but the art and music software I use almost daily don't have equivalents under Linux. :-(