I am the world's largest fan of Windows XP. It is reliable, it works with a ridiculous amount of software, it is attractive and easy to use for even the most novice users.
But this week I am even more of a fan of Windows XP. I now have Vista installed on my machine. Vista is a thing of beauty. I am intoxicated by its beauty so much that I have resisted the urge to do the sensible thing and put XP back.
I had this computer built for me six months back with a view to installing Vista on it when it came out. It is a pretty decent machine for an office tool. It has 4GB of RAM and a dual core 3.2 GHz Intel Pentium brain. It supports 4 decent sized monitors and has never let me down. Before this week. My computer is fully up to spec for Vista. Vista installed with barely a whimper; and far less histrionics than I expected. There were no problems with any of the drivers and I got Mozilla Thunderbird moved across from the old hard drive complete with addresses, message rules and emails. All joy then.
The first little bug-ette, was trying to use Paint Shop Pro 8. This is a cracking little program; it does just about everything the full blown version of Photoshop does at a fraction of the cost or brain power. Vista welcomed it with open arms. It installed from the disc and gave no hint of disagreement. Until you try and crop anything. Then the program takes its stumps home. No problem; I had expected a few minor incompatibilities so I downloaded the new version. This works fine. I can now edit pictures. Version 11 is better anyway. And I like spending money.
Next little niggle is the sound card. As I said, everything installed nicely with Vista. The sound card is fully functioning, it has an updated driver designed for this operating system and it makes noises - but not like it used to. On XP I could have stereo sound coming out of the computer speakers and out of my audio amp via an optical output. If I wanted I could even have stereo from the computer speakers and Dolby 5.1 from the amp. At the same time. Now I can have either but not both. If I want to switch speakers I have to close Media Player - or whatever - switch default device and start Media Player up again. That's just rubbish.
All well then, apart from a few niggles.
Microsoft hath murder'd sleep. Windows 98 was renowned as a bugger to shut down but XP is usually pretty good. You can even do it without a mouse - press the Windows button and then "U" twice. Off it pops to bed. But then it can take a few minutes to wake up again, especially if you don't have much memory and you run lots of anti-virus and firewall software. So Microsoft decided that we should put our machines to sleep rather than turn them off. Good idea. The machine goes to sleep in seconds and then awakes brightly in the morning ready to start a new day. In theory. However; it hasn't quite worked that way for me yet. Each time I have reawakened it from sleep it has had a minor issue with little unimportant things; each time it's different. Problems have included Internet Explorer, the video card - in various different ways and the network. The only solution is rebooting Vista; which does sort of defeat the object. Turning off Vista is a little bit more protracted than it used to be as well. Why make things harder?
So these are the niggles. When I stop crying I shall tell you about my fun with file sharing.
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