A couple of months ago, after the burglary, I replaced the nicked big-red-beast of a laptop with a shiny new Core 2 Duo / 2GB of RAM laptop, powerful enough to run SONAR, all its dependencies, and a Java IDE at the same time without dying. It's still heavier than your average laptop, but not quite so much as to generate its own gravitational pull, like the old one. (It's so much more calming to be able to site down and browse t'intarweb without small objects orbiting your laptop, you know? The accretion disk of pens and paperclips always got in my way, and the time distortions played hell with my google calendar...)
Anyway, at the time I bought it, the *ONLY* OS you could get from Dell was Vista. I ummed and aahed, and debated and discussed, and eventually decided to ignore my own standard policy of wait-till-at-least-service-pack-1-before-installing-any-new-MS-OS and take the plunge. It arrived, and I admit I was pleasantly surprised..... at first. Until I tried to put any software on it.
Firefox often (about half the time) won't start, the process just sits there using ~ 4M of RAM and never even getting the splash screen, and the process can't be killed. I have to reboot the laptop and try again.
The Apache 2.2 service won't start.
The Bluedragon 7 JX service will start, but immediately stop.
Windows Firewall drives me so nuts I had to turn it off to prevent an unfortunate episode involving me, a shopping mall, a chainsaw, and visions of GTA3.
User Account Control - yes, yes, I KNOW it's off! I turned it off deliberately, dammit! Stop telling me about it!
Office 2007 - a brave idea, to depart from the established interface so completely, but where the hell is the "Save As..." command? Where's it gone?! The help file tells you how to use it, but doesn't tell you where it is! Can't I load a document, make some changes and then save it to a different filename anymore? I'm downgrading.
There's a pre-installed copy of CineLink PowerDVD that I've NEVER run, but seems to be permanently resident and using up to 200MB of RAM - is this a DRM thing..?
Roll on service pack 1....
2 comments:
Save as is the big round thing top-left. :)
After my recent HD failure at cf.Objective, I finally made the move over to Ubuntu.
I have to say, despite the learning curve, it is a absolute dream to use, and I am absolutely loving it.
I'd highly recommend making the move.
When my new Dell XPS gets to me, it's going to be a dual boot Vista / Ubuntu, and Vista is only going to be around for DirectX10 games.
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