A friend pinged me a couple of days ago with this question:
“Oct 7th you said you were getting a new PC with “vista”
Oct 9th the last post to your blog.
Co-Incidence? I think not….
So how is the new machine?
How is Vista?”
You know who you are 🙂
His question is well posed. My new computer has Windows Vista Home Premium installed on it. Although it’s been out for a while now, there are loads of interesting quirks with it.
Let me say that I really like a LOT of the new paradigms. The search is actually GOOD! I like the fact that I can hit the Windows key and just start typing a search for a program that I want to run, a contact name or a filename and they rapidly appear in the start menu. The Aero theme is pretty slick too. I’m VERY glad that I didn’t bother to try to retrofit an existing machine with Vista. Take my advice, unless you absolutely *love* tinkering with your box, just wait until you get a new one before indulging in Vista.
It took exactly 3 days before I went in and disabled UAC (directions here). As a friend at work stated “UAC is great if you don’t know anything about computers but it really gets in your way if you’re comfortable with them”. He’s right. UAC is that annoying feature that *will* prevent malware from taking over your machine. But if you normally like digging into the guts of your machine you will find it annoying very quickly. i.e. Open your hosts file with notepad, make edits then try to save, ooops! you should have opened notepad in administrator mode. Too bad so sad.
One problem that I faced was in using the task scheduler. It looks like there is a bug in the Vista Home Premium edition only that causes it to try to run under the system account even when you specify an account and password that you want it to run under. This might not be so bad except that it fails anyway. From my research this has been a problem for nearly a year now with no fix in sight (SP1 I await you). So my nightly backup has changed from running at a preordained early morning time via “Scheduled Tasks” to runnning “Daily” via “Syncback SE’s” own scheduler. This, of course then becomes dependent on when I restart my machine as to when backups are taken.
Also, Vista comes with a “Photos” screen saver, which seems to be the nicest one I can find for displaying both still and moving image files. But it consistently crashes (caught by Vista before it can do any damage. But I’d prefer my screensaver not to fail regularly. I’ll update this entry with window’s cute name for this (**update** “Data Execution Prevention”) but the actual Application event log shows as
“Faulting application PhotoScreensaver.scr, version 6.0.6000.16510, time stamp 0x467b2825, faulting module xvidcore.dll_unloaded, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x41c6a36e, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0d16f684, process id 0x1e48, application start time 0x01c8163284872183.”
More to come…
**Another update October 26, 2007 ** keyword: photos screen saver was closed