When I bought my new pc in March, I was ambivalent (yet hopeful, if that makes sense) about the preinstalled copy of Vista which was to be installed on it. Since my current hard disk was more than sufficient for all things productive (linux), I left the new drive with windows for my games. I like games. I had a few troubles with the onboard sound with the linux kernel, so I bought a cheap SB Live! card which was perfect – hardware mixing and 5.1 sound. The caveat? Of course, the product is now so old that it isn’t supported by Vista. Sad, because it truly is one of the most reliable products that has ever hit the pc market. I was stuck with archaic stereo sound for games which was a shame, but something I was willing to live with.
So back to the topic. For the last 3 months I’ve come to totally hate that operating system. It’s flashy and fun for 3 weeks or so… Oh, hell, I’m not going to complain, there are many more complaints out there on the web. To the crux, it couldn’t even do what I wanted – play games! (aside from a few, that is).
Today I wiped out the drive and reinstalled xp, which boots in fractions of the time, supports my soundcard, plays my games well!
Here’s a word of warning. If you plan on doing windows installations, remove the power from the linux disk before you start and save yourself a potentially disastrous situation of formatting the incorrect disk. The partition manager for win xp setup is notoriously bad. Also, after the installation is finished, don’t forget to repower the drive. Otherwise, if your CD drive is on the same IDE cable, the slave jumper settings may confuse xp and totally mess everything up (like freezing the machine on cd access – this stumped me for an hour or so).
The entire process left a poor taste in my mouth, one which I’m far to familiar with. I’ll be glad when (or if…) I can play all I like on my happy kubuntu installation.
Yeah, MS has a deal with my university, where all CS students have access to the MSDN catalog,(Because the CS labs are Linux only) so I got Vista when I could, to see what all the fuss was about. Within about 2 weeks I decided that it was crap, and put XP back on. And I can go without games, but my wife needs her Sims 2 and a few windows only office programs.
I’m a gamer. I was a gamer before owning my own computer (I used to play galaga and a helicopter game in my dad’s work computer, about two decades ago). I switched to linux permanently (no more dual booting) a few months ago, maybe a year now, I’m not sure.
Some games don’t work on linux (natively or with wine), but I take that as an indicator of the quality of the game. The sims (the first one) had obvious issues, it required an admin account I believe, which was stupid (yes, I tried setting WinXP for my family with user accounts).
As for the SB Live!, you should be aware MS decided hardware sound wasn’t needed and games that use DirectSound and DirectSound3D are entirely software in Vista. Games have to use OpenAL to use hardware acceleration. And it’s creative’s fault if there aren’t drivers for Vista, btw.
Yeah, we’ve had nothing but trouble with Vista here at work. I like some of their UI direction, but dislike a lot of it too. And it still seems bloated and badly designed at the low-level.
Developing for it is a pita, the new security architecture is just shit. They should have copied the Unix model frankly.
It IS Creative’s fault that the driver support is bad. Creative has sucked ever since they released AWE32. They’ve been a constant stream of problems for everyone – not releasing information, not releasing drivers, silly 10 floppy disk “drivers” back at time, “enhanchements” such as prorietary cd drive controllers on the sound cards, .. You name it – they have screwed it.
Developing for Vista is just plain awesome, just fire up their IDE and lean on the C# and .NET and especially WPF (WPF is 5 years ahead anything open source atm) and woohoo! Just use the proper tools for proper job! That’s where that environment is really awesome.
What really hit Microsoft and created a lot annoyances in the Vista is a combination of internal change resistance (they’ve got a lot of useless C drones and people with their mindsets still on the 80s – you know the guys who are like 99% of the open source zealots) and lack of balls (they couldn’t change and force things too much, they would have been sued to oblivion.. it’s not easy being a genuine leader of an industry worth hundreds of billions of euros yearly and having products everyone else is basing theirs on). So yeah, it has got some annoyances.
I can however provide a more appropriate backdrop for the situation: there was a time when Microsoft introduced something really great and superior, the “NT platform”, something which would be the top dog in couple years.. Millions of lame zealots and fanboys started yelling, whining, and crying. Later, they produced w2000. The same again. Against all the new features started the yelling and cussing “I will NEVER use that crap!! Omg wtf it’s so bloated!!!”. Yet, everyone did. And yeah, 9/10 of those features received small fixes and became such that people wont be without them nowadays. You’ll just see, Vista will be (after XP, which holds the current records afaik) the most succesful piece of commercial software ever. And a lot of the people will actually really *like* it after the first shock. Of the 1 billion computers (the target market) some 900 million will run Vista after a few years and most of the people don’t just care enough to bother changing, or they actually like it.