The secret to Vista is XP

It looks like someone you have seen before but obviously younger. Once you see the parent you can put two and two together. This is the offspring. It is faster, bigger, and consumes much more. It will learn the programs it deems important quicker than its parent and run them more efficiently than the old folks thought possible. The 'other' programs are given a blue screen and left for dead. Sneered at and shunned. Refused entry at the door.

I think I may have finally tamed this beast called Vista and all I had to do is tell it's mommy how it was behaving. How it wasn't letting my programs into the party. How it was turning up its nose and giving them the blue finger of death right in front of me.

The most important feature I can find in Vista is the compatibility tab. Microsoft has included a nice feature with the properties of any exe file. Right click and choose properties. You will see a new tab called Compatibility. This will allow you to run the program as it would be run under a previous OS. Why would anyone want to shell out $200+ to run programs through XP emulation? BECAUSE IT WORKS!!! My PC may look like a Vista machine... but if you open up the hood you will see more after market XP parts than an XP machine has.

Tomorrow I write(complain) about administration rights and the WINDOWS DEFENDER. Stay tuned!!!

So far so good. My CPU core is staying right around 30C which is surprisingly low. Oblivion looks better than I could have imagined and CS Source is running smoothly at the highest settings.

I have Vista Aero running which looks nice but there really is no reason to upgrade to Vista. It definitely isn't worth the price unless it is bundled in a new machine. I love that it gets me to the desktop quicker but that wouldn't be so important if it didn't crash so much. An occasional crash or lock up is expected from Windows users but Vista is frustrating because most of them just happen when I am trying to do something I have done before. I got a couple blue screens when I installed drivers or new hardware/software. That is always a risk. It is maddening to get them while trying to load Geometry Wars or launching a game or app that has run plenty of times before. If you are thinking of upgrading I would strongly recommend against it until SP1. There are too many companies that need to release stable drivers and too many hang ups that need to be worked out. Not to mention it is an extremely expensive "upgrade." I doubt that the average PC owner looking to upgrade any PC that is older than a year will be happy with how Vista would run on their machine. Instead you should go look for a new background and Vista theme for XP because that is all I have used so far.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who gave birthday and Christmas money that helped build me a new computer!!!

This should probably be a longer update.

My buddy Tim came over today and we got my new PC put together. The original BIOS was trying to boot from the empty hard drive but once we got in there and set up the optical drive as the first boot option it was pretty much smooth sailing. I did get a blue screen of death after I installed the "Vista" driver for my onboard audio.

I have to say Vista is pretty cool but unfortunatly I don't know what I am doing. I always used "Classic View" in XP so my PC has looked about a decade old until now. The blue screen of death is about the only thing I recognized. I have Vista Ultimate so I can run Aero and all of its flipping transparent goodness.

I just got my mouse, keyboard, video card, and CPU utility fully installed and supported so I am going to put it all to good use and play some Oblivion, F.E.A.R., and CS Source. I'll post an update about how it all goes. Later this week I am gonna install all of my Adobe(Macromedia) software and see how things run. Here is a rundown of what I bought.

MSI P6N NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI Platinum
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz
1 GB RAM
XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT
Lian-Li PC-6087

P.S. last I checked my CPU was running at 33C because of the fatty Zalman 9700 lol. I'll have to see what it is at after a couple games.