Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Fun with Windows Vista

I've had a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 for a couple of weeks now, and last night I finally got around to installing it on my PC (a lovely Dell Optiplex GX260 I picked up off of Retrobox.com for a good price). I need to add more memory, a bigger hard drive, and a AGP video card - so that took some time to secure the funds to buy the parts. I also wanted to clone my existing hard drive onto the new one, so I wouldn't have to reinstall everything. Got that taken care of thanks to a driver cloning freeware program I found, and then I was all set. Finally got around to actually doing the install last night, and it didn't take too long, about 42 minutes. Not bad really. Got user accounts setup for myself and the wife, went to ATI (for my video card) and got their drivers for Windows Vista installed. Didn't get too much time to play around last night, but I did check out the Widgets... whoops, 'Gadgets' a little bit. But even with limited time on the system, I'm already annoyed with the User Account Control popping up all time, locking down the desktop till you tell it that the program or applet or Control Panel you just launched is OK to run. That's getting tired VERY quickly. One weird thing - the display was acting a little strange. Hard to describe exactly, but it kind of hiccups. It's really the only description I can think of - and it's very odd. Perhaps the new Aero Glass display mode doesn't like my old Sony Trinitron monitor (well, it is about 6 years old - and in computer time, that's ancient). Perhaps something else is goofy. I'll have to play around with it. So, I'll be popping in with further thoughts as I get to spend more time playing around with Windows Vista - stay tuned...

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