Data's Neural Net

Windows Vista. If it weren't for the fact that I only had to pay €17 to get it (and that Windows XP was being sold for the exact same price), I probably never would've gotten around to installing it.

You see, Vista has had its share of bad reviews. No matter where I looked or turned, people were complaining about Vista. Perhaps that's just the environment I live in, but I digress.

Windows Vista is, on first appearance, a stunning new operating system from Microsoft. Despite what others might say, I can just 'feel' that a lot of the insides have indeed been changed, rewritten to suit a new age.

Unfortunately, that just happens to be just what it is: a first appearance. Indeed, the installation of Vista itself couldn't be more annoying from the start. You would expect to see a loading bar or something to show up when you boot up the DVD, but apart from the initial 'loading' progress bar, you can't see that anything is going on.

One of the things I hate about computers nowadays is that people design their operating systems/software to be as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately, this kills the "power users" (read: anybody who uses computers on a regular basis) like myself. A screen saying "loading" is nice, but a screen specifying exactly what it just happens to be loading would be a very helpful thing for pretty much anybody. And not showing that you're loading at all -- like the Vista setup initially does -- is the worst way to go about it.

Fortunately, the bad sides ended there, and I soon saw the good sides of Vista. It started with the DVD which asked me to input my serial key before I reformatted my hard drive and installed the operating system. Previous versions of Windows would first install the operating system and then proceed to query me about the serial key. If I just happen to have lost the serial key somehow, or for some other reason I am unable to input it into the computer, I'm stuck with an operating system which has already installed itself and a now unusable computer. Granted, I don't reckon this happens that much, but it's at least comforting to know that if you do get into trouble with your serial key, you can always use the operating system that was previously installed.

A great feature about Vista is it's ability to shrink hard drives. If you have a 40 GB partition, you can now shrink it down to 30 GB, and use the 10 GB remaining to form another partition. In some cases, this can be very handy. Unfortunately, the Vista Setup does not contain this feature built-in; one has to actually have Vista installed to make use of it.

After the installation of Vista, I was greeted with a brand new login screen. It looks shiny, but there's a problem with that: I don't particularly like shiny operating systems, and there doesn't seem to be a way to easily switch back to the classic login box.

But fine, maybe I'm digging too much into this. At least Vista still has support for the old 'classic skin', so I could turn Windows Aero off and pretty much "disable everything that makes Vista, Vista", according to some of my classmates.

I must say that I like a lot of new features I have seen in Vista. For example, it is now possible to alter the volume on a per-application basis. This can come in handy, especially when dealing with BYOND. Sometimes I may want to mute or lower the volume of a particular BYOND game, but I find that the game doesn't have a volume control because of the ineptitude ignorance of developers. Vista makes altering the volume or completely muting the sound for an application a peach.

And the volume controls also work great in my setup. I have headphones and I have speakers, and Vista has built-in support to allow me to switch between them at will. Hats off for Vista for this wonderful feature!

Of course, all things have their downsides. For instance, it's not possible for me to set my "Stereo Mix" to use the headphones instead of my speakers, so I was forced to turn the speakers on just to hear what I had been broadcasting over Skype. Neither it is possible to enable two audio devices at the same time, so I could enable both the speakers and the headphones at the same time.

One particular new feature of Vista is the User Account Control (UAC). This feature attempts to prevent applications from making changes to your system and prevents the user from making accidental changes to the system by displaying a warning every time something is about to happen. I had to quickly turn this off just because it was getting annoying. Luckily, I heard that Windows 7 has a more improved version of this, where it's possible to set it up so that it will only query the user when an application tries to change things, and not if the user tries to.

But of course, a lot more has to be going wrong with Vista, as I'm back on XP now. It all started when my hard drive suddenly failed.

You see, the graphics card I'm using (an Nvidia GeForce 8600GT) happens to have a passive heat sink in favor of a fan, to keep the computer silent. This is nice, however the temperatures were apparently increasing up to 80 degrees Celcius, which is NOT good for the rest of the equipment.

I noticed this earlier on and talked to the company I bought the computer from about it, and they told me that it was a glitch in the sensors. I shrugged it off, and trusted their word for it. Bad move.

It turns out that the hard drive was being cooked by the graphics card. You see, the CPU fan has a cap over it that blows all the air out of the computer before it has time to spread. Lacking any other form of coolers, the computer slowly began heating up, until eventually the hard drive had to pay the price.

Of course, the hard drive failing isn't a problem with Vista, and you may think I'm digressing again, but this is where it went wrong:

When I got a new hard drive, and reinstalled Vista, the old hard drive was sent back to the manufacturers for repair. Inbetween, I had already run Vista with both hard drives in it.

Turning my computer off using the power switch just causes Vista to switch to hibernation mode. Nothing wrong with that, as I like the mode -- it allows me to boot my computer up much faster than a full boot would, and my applications stay alive.

The big turn happened when I had removed both hard drives (don't ask) and plugged the new one back in, albeit in a different SATA slot. Vista started back up from hibernation mode, coughed, and promptly froze up. I rebooted the system... and all my files were suddenly gone!

For some reason unknown to me, Vista somehow messed with my Master File Table, causing all my files to disappear. I managed to use the Vista DVD to restore my files using the "CHKDSK" tool, however, Vista would refuse to start up. It would get stuck at a black screen, where only my mouse was visible.

This, along with the dozens of complaints from other people, the "apology from Microsoft about Vista" I kept hearing about, and my own experiences, have led me back to XP.

If anyone from Microsoft happens to be reading this, now or in the future (although I doubt even regular BYOND users would read it... maybe apart from you... :p), I have only a single suggestion to make: give your customers some kind of means to give proper feedback! Last I heard, the beta version of Windows 7 has a "give feedback" option; keep it in even outside of the beta release, and listen to your customers! It might save us all a lot of time.

-- Data
(Yes, I know I should probably have put images on here, along with this wall of text, but I can't really be bothered to find any good ones at the moment, and I'm dying to continue with what I have been trying to do all day: watch the latest episode of Monk!)