Thursday, July 27, 2006
Further Vista Thoughts
Vista ExperiencesIt was truly amazing to see my Gateway 817GM running the Beta2 Vista OS from Micr$oft lock up so tight that the only cure was to pull the power plug from behind the computer. All I was doing was trying to change the channel on my Hauppauge 150MCE running Micro$oft's Media Center. Vista is supposed to give us this great TV experience. It was a great experience!!! This is the first complete computer lockup for me in the last five years. Usually when a crash would happen Ctrl-Alt-Delete would solve the problem; or the tast manager could be used to end the task. Not this time!! It is beta software BUT the TV part should be more stable than to completely lock up the computer.
Downloading and installing "Sage TV" solved the lock up problem. However the time shown on the TV Guide by Sage is 4 hours too fast. Will have to see what is causing that. All the other parts of Sage seem to work just fine. They do NOT claim that Sage will work on Vista. It is supposed to be installed on Windows XP, however, it installed without complaint and seems to run just fine.
Downloading and installing "Sage TV" solved the lock up problem. However the time shown on the TV Guide by Sage is 4 hours too fast. Will have to see what is causing that. All the other parts of Sage seem to work just fine. They do NOT claim that Sage will work on Vista. It is supposed to be installed on Windows XP, however, it installed without complaint and seems to run just fine.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Vista Thoughts
For the past couple of weeks since Vista Beta2 came out, I have been playing with Vista on a Gateway 817GM, with a 3 gigaHertz Pentium4, 3 gig and a 200 gig hard drive. Aero works well with an nVIDA GeForce 7600 with 256MB RAM PCIe card. There should probably be some tuning to offer a bit more speed, but as is it is OK. The UI shows the greatest change and results in some confusion since the changes are not intutive but rather seem to reflect what the programmer thinks is "correct". It is pretty annoying to have the changes made just for what appear to be cosmetic reasons rather than changes that fit more with the way people think. The UI changes are definitely something that programmers will appreaciate; the rest of the world is likely to yawn and wonder why the change.
For example the address bar sometimes shows a "picture" of where the focus is rather than the fully qualified directory path. What is the difference? Both are confusing to a non-programmer or to a person who has not been "taught" how to read the address bar. Once you have been taught it is just annoying to change the view of where the directory is located. It is still a "directory". If is quacks, if it waddles, if it is white, it is probably a duck no matter what other name might be attached to the organism! It is espically annoying when a click in the address bar switchs to the fully qualified path name for the directory! Just what is the sense in that?
The biggest problem is the cost of the computer that is needed to take advantage of all of the neat things that Vista is capable of doing. Vista will NOT run on most of the computers that have been sold lately. My first attempt was to run Vista on an eMachine with a 2 gigaHertz Celeron, 1.2 gig RAM, 200 gig hard drive, Radeon 9250 128MB RAM PCI card. Aero did NOT run. Vista was useable but ran slowly. Not so slow as to be unuseable but definitely annoying! The Gateway is very useable and usually run with acceptable quickness. However running Windows XP on the Gateway results in a quick reacting very nice running computer. You do not have the pretty face of Vista BUT it is much quicker reacting and enables quality work to be done easily. The eMachine running Windows XP is very useable; not as quick as the Gateway but quality work may be done with ease.
It is amazing how much slower Vista is on the same computer as compared to XP. It is difficult to see to whom Micro$oft is planning to sell Vista. Any company with any sense already has XP locked down and it's people trained. They will have to start all over again to train their people to use Vista. Office 7 is the same can of worms! All the users have a definite learning curve that will impact the productivity of the whole orgranization. Vista is pretty but since when does pretty get the annual report out the door; when does pretty get the quarterly report finished quicker and more accurately?
For example the address bar sometimes shows a "picture" of where the focus is rather than the fully qualified directory path. What is the difference? Both are confusing to a non-programmer or to a person who has not been "taught" how to read the address bar. Once you have been taught it is just annoying to change the view of where the directory is located. It is still a "directory". If is quacks, if it waddles, if it is white, it is probably a duck no matter what other name might be attached to the organism! It is espically annoying when a click in the address bar switchs to the fully qualified path name for the directory! Just what is the sense in that?
The biggest problem is the cost of the computer that is needed to take advantage of all of the neat things that Vista is capable of doing. Vista will NOT run on most of the computers that have been sold lately. My first attempt was to run Vista on an eMachine with a 2 gigaHertz Celeron, 1.2 gig RAM, 200 gig hard drive, Radeon 9250 128MB RAM PCI card. Aero did NOT run. Vista was useable but ran slowly. Not so slow as to be unuseable but definitely annoying! The Gateway is very useable and usually run with acceptable quickness. However running Windows XP on the Gateway results in a quick reacting very nice running computer. You do not have the pretty face of Vista BUT it is much quicker reacting and enables quality work to be done easily. The eMachine running Windows XP is very useable; not as quick as the Gateway but quality work may be done with ease.
It is amazing how much slower Vista is on the same computer as compared to XP. It is difficult to see to whom Micro$oft is planning to sell Vista. Any company with any sense already has XP locked down and it's people trained. They will have to start all over again to train their people to use Vista. Office 7 is the same can of worms! All the users have a definite learning curve that will impact the productivity of the whole orgranization. Vista is pretty but since when does pretty get the annual report out the door; when does pretty get the quarterly report finished quicker and more accurately?
