My Vista Experiences: a week later

Well I set a goal for myself this weekend to get everything working do or die or uninstall Vista and put back XP on my system. I’m happy to say Vista is still here, and I’m prepping for the future.

Silicon Image finally wrote a good driver for Vista so that I can use my SATA card. Netgear still doesn’t have their act together for Vista compatible drivers for my SC101, but they did post an update in their forums saying that support for Vista was forthcoming with the public release of Vista in January. I can kludge along with that answer in the mean time.

I had to turn off User Access Control. It was way too restrictive in its operation and required way too many authorization clicks to make the experience enjoyable. Also having it on break the Extract here capabilities of WinRar 3.11. Not a big deal entirely, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I understand what it’s for – Newbies who should not be running strange executables, or deleting important files… but for someone of my caliber, it was just a waste of my time.

WoW runs slower. So much so in fact, that I had to switch to full screen in order for it to not be so choppy. So gaming in general I think will take a hit. You will need a new system soon. Just bank on that fact.  Vista with Aero Glass is a bit of a resource hog. Keep in mind I have the sidebar with gadgets fully on and transparent and all of Aero Glass.

Firefox 2.0 is a bit more stable now. Not sure what was  causing the problems before. I still get the dreaded Blue Screen of Death from time to time. I think its related to the on board audio. It just doesn’t play nice. Most of the crashes happen when I have a video file paused and minimized.

The Logitech G15 keyboard driver is still the XP driver, but it seems to work. Although intermittently the cpu usage bar will stop working, but that was an issue I had in XP as well, so not sure what’s going on there. Their support forums aren’t much help either. The LCD at least works in games.

Most of my older programs all work fine, among them Trillian,  RenameIt, Advanced Disk Catalog, FireFox, Winzip and WinRar all get along with Vista. Symantec AntiVirus I had to explicitly tell the setup to run in supervisor mode or else it wouldn’t install, but I think that was User Access Control kicking in again, being a general pain in the ass.

All in all so far: Make sure you run the Upgrade Advisor (not like you have a choice when you upgrade). But listen to  it about which drivers are incompatible or don’t exist, as it’s pretty dead on, and if it says no go, then it literally will not install. Also you may want to wait for the drivers to mature a bit before installing. I’m sure that the video drivers particularly have a ways to go before maximum optimization is achieved.

Chrome out.