Hasta La Vista
Prior to Hellgate having its way with my computer, I had been noticing some general slowdown and such with my XP installation. I am not sure if this was general cruft building up or a result of using programs like TuneUp, but I decided that this was as good a time as any to try out Vista. Since I was going to be reinstalling an OS anyway (and Vista SP1 just came out), I decided to take the plunge.
The way was filled with obstacles from the beginning. First, my USB keyboard is recognized when the BIOS starts up and when Windows starts up, but in that brief moment when you have to “Hit any key to boot from CD” it does not work. So I actually had to go downtown in a snowstorm to buy a keyboard with a PS/2 attachment just to boot from the Vista CD (I returned the keyboard the next day of course). Naturally my wireless mouse did not work either, but fortunately I had a wired mouse to fall back on.
Whoever at my graduate school made the student CD that I got for Vista made sure to put a note on the CD that this was an “Upgrade Only”. This was a lie. After I installed XP fresh and put Vista in to upgrade my installation, I discovered that the Upgrade option was disabled and the CD was for fresh Vista installations only. WTF… It wasn’t that big a deal, but it was a waste of time. The DS really shined in these moments.
Installation went smoothly for the most part after that. It is annoying to have to type the admin password for everything (even deleting icons…), but supposedly this will decrease with time. On Bunky’s computer, it doesn’t seem to come up that often, so I am hopeful. A number of programs will not work unless they are Run as Administrator, which is also annoying. It took many tries just to get BF2142 to install, and then I had to tweak the permissions to keep PunkBuster from kicking me as soon as I loaded in.
I am also having a problem with the driver for my HP Laserjet 1012. It simply will not work with Vista. Vista looks for a 1010 driver, and HP seems to only have a 1020 driver that should work with 1012, but neither works correctly. I partially blame HP for this, however, as this printer had driver problems with XP as well, and that is not acceptable.
Other than that, Vista doesn’t seem too bad. It may just be because it is a fresh install, but startup seems a bit peppier now. I like the UI overall, and the gadgets are nice (I wish you could resize them, though).
By Catnip, 3/10/2008 @ 2:47 pm
You can turn off that annoying ask for password everytime thing in the control Panel, it is called UAC. now MS don’t recommend it because this is supposedly more secure, but hey, you are a big boy
By teahouseblossom, 3/14/2008 @ 7:30 am
Hmm..sounds like Vista is still buggy.
I think I still have Windows 95, haw!!