Wrestling the Beast

No updates in the last week, courtesy of Windows Vista Home Premium edition. A friend asked me to install some stuff and hook up some printers, soundcards that kind of thing to his new HP unit which came with Vista installed. I was excited, I admit, but soon after the loading was done, the feeling of joy left quicker than a shithouse rat down a drain.

So this friend is an architect, artist, lecturer, bohemian type fellow and is more about getting the work done, and not worrying about how to install this, where are the drivers for that, and so on. So we grab his Photoshop and AutoCAD to install, only to be told to that AutoCAD 2008 at a mere 5000 earth monies, and Adobe CS2 at 1000 more, will be all you need to get you on your merry way. So if you happen to run a firm of 40 architects or engineers you will need to spend a quarter of a million upgrading to Vista. Wheres me old BitTorrent client I wondered……
Oh and that gets me onto another thing. Piracy. Since so many pieces of software have to be updated to run on vista, I’ll bet you a pint that this will be the year of the most downloads for pirates since Henry Morgan and his swashbuckling kin ruled the waves.

Currently I run a 3.65 Ghz Prescott Chip with 3Gigs of ram and a very trimmed startup list on XP. When she’s on, she idles at 340 odd megs of system ram occupied. My friends system, with the E6300 chip and 2 gigs of ram on vista runs at about 730 megs of system ram occupied whilst idling. That alone is friggin scarier than waking up with Osama in the bed beside you.

Now imagine having to reinstall all the maps for the mod and theres quite a few. Each time a new installation window that requires you to hit the “next” button pops up, it does it in the most pointless graphical gymnastics ever seen – by fading in and out while zooming at the same time, an effect that last looked funky in the Streets of San Francisco starring Michael Douglas and Knobbeldy Nose all those years ago. This gets extremely annoying after a while yet not as pointless as all those “Can your computer have permission to open this unknown piece of software called Microsoft Update?” And does this stupid interface remember your choice should you try to run it again? Not on your nelly. Mercifully you can knock this stuff off, but its not immediately clear, as the control panel has about forty odd icons, that now split every simple function into painful cheery sugar coated gaudy icons.

However, this is a benchmark in some ways similar to Windows 95, only that was software driven, and this is hardware driven. DX10 graphics cards etc. will only run on Vista. Drivers for this new hardware are so dodgy they make greasy haired second hand car dealers look like choirboys. Games, Test Drive Unlimited for instance, is so unsure of what DirectX platform it should honour, gets around this by being laggy and stuttery on nearly all platforms, even with high end systems. HP and Creative, two major companies who have a software autoupdate system, have some charming ways of telling you that your hard paid for hardware will not have a dedicated driver until Q3 this year. What a sloppy operation. So by years end the benchmark in the upgrade stakes will be the have-nots and the wish-they-hadn’t. Get saving now.

Administrator: The person with the rights to access all the files on the machine and funny enough, also the person that paid for the machine and Operation System? Not on Vista. Even if it reassures you that you are the Admin, its in name only. Changing the rights to allow yourself complete control over files in hidden directories is only available by going into the registry and bashing a few keys and dwords. Oh, and this isn’t possible on Home Premium, unless I upgrade as was suggested by the frustrating pop-up mother.

I get the feeling that there must be no power users working in R&D in Microsoft, no people with multiple screens, old printers or deadlines to hit. If there were, they would suddenly realise that patronising their customers with this “recipe collecting” approach to computing and organising their data is painful in the extreme. We don’t get into work and fool with email for an hour and play with the internet and go home. We are the people that treat regedit as a challenging playground, the internet as a means to an end, getting file formats to open in multiple apps backwards is an ease, and generally being very efficient in what we want to get done, done. Vista is a step backward, but if you wrestle with it enough, turn off the graphic nonsense and big brother/nervous mom popups, you’ll find you’re running a very compliant version of XP with DirectX 10 installed.