windows vista

recently, microsoft had a public beta out for vista beta 2 available for download… having my linux partition as my major partition and windows xp installed for gaming purposes (cedega is great, but i find that games like WoW run much more smoothly in windows), i decided to try to replace xp with vista just to check it out.

for starters, it looks really nice… the visual effects and stuff are nice. however, its flaws quickly became apparent - first and foremost, the whole “security by prompt” concept is ridiculously annoying – essentially, even if you are an admin, you are asked before almost anything happens - if i try to do any file operation, especially under program files (i am talking about creating directories, or deleting shortcuts off the desktop for applications just installed), i get security warnings that “this could be a security hazard, would you like to continue?” not only were they simple warnings, the whole screen would fade out and just bring up the one pop up box.

another thing i discovered (while trying to download the patch for WoW, admittantly :)) was that vista cuts the network device off if you’re using too much bandwidth (its a torrent download weighing around 600 mb) - to the extent that you can’t ipconfig /renew (you can /release, but you can’t renew) – and things stop working. i am sure my network connection was working because i was using the net on my other computer just fine. until i rebooted, i couldn’t use the internet at all.

finally, my 2005fpw was detecting as a “generic pnp monitor,” and i failed to get the driver correctly installed for it, and, as a result, i couldn’t play WoW in widescreen mode. oh and microsoft sql server management studio express wouldn’t install on vista either.

anyway… although most of the issues above are fixable by some set of obscure settings in msconfig and other places, i switched back to xp for the time being for a smoother gaming experience. i also gave office 2007 beta a whirl, and although its pretty different (no menus really, just a tab structure), it seems to be pretty nice. i like its built in “export to pdf” feature, but i heard they were forced to drop it.