Kevin's Watch

Welcome back Sorus!!!

Long time no see!!!

We've missed you at the scrabble table.

And I've missed you committing Diablo II mayhem and carnage together!!

Hope all is well and that you can play with us some time!!

I have researched Vista quite a bit, used it once, and have had two friends confirm that Vista is great on a PC that is both new, fast, and tweaked enough to run it and make use of the features (the aren't Mac's cool Aqua interface) that make it WinVista and not just an annoying and really expensive "let's once again learn a different way to do the same old things while losing the drivers for most of the things I finally got to work" service patch for WinXP.

In general, trying to upgrade a non-Vista system to run Vista is something not recommended for the uninitiated. The process is guaranteed to be painful, frustrating, and ultimately will not give you the neatest features of Vista.
I used the word 'neatest' beacuse I haven't noticed any one feature of Vista that makes it must-have... unless you count the fact that older Windows versions are falling off the MS support list to make it must-have. There's nothing like creating your own market, is there?

Ah well, progress marches on, as long as we are unwittingly willing to pay more and more for less and less of it.

[/crotchetiness]

dw

Since we're comapring specs, I bought a new PC quite recently as well:
Core 2 Duo E6400
2GB RAM
320GB HDD
Geforce 7600GT.

Nathan, that sounds like pretty good specs (dw's still using a doddering old Athlon 700MHz)/ Will you be using the Aqua interface? I've heard that it is truly a hog of both your GPU RAM as well as your overall System RAM.

dw

Creator wrote:Welcome back Sorus!!!

Long time no see!!!

We've missed you at the scrabble table.

And I've missed you committing Diablo II mayhem and carnage together!!

Thanks!

Sooo much stuff to reinstall...

S O R U S !!!!!!

LUCI!!!!




I've hijacked another thread...

DukkhaWaynhim wrote:Ah well, progress marches on, as long as we are unwittingly willing to pay more and more for less and less of it.

Hear hear.

--A

(Thanks Nathan, DukkhaWaynhim and HLT, your advice is much appreciated and has been followed! I've NEVER used AOL so I don't know how or why this thing appeared on my PC but anyway hopefully it's gone for good now)

Apparently I can install my software if I 'upgrade' to Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or higher.


I wonder how seriously it would mess things up if I tried...

Speed up Windows Vista

This is very useful.

Damn! You guys are making me jones for a new laptop. Which I cannot afford if I want to go to Elohimfest this year.


This may prove useful to some of you who are updating and tweaking the systems:

www.majorgeeks.com/RegCleaner_d460.html

It's a freeware registry cleaner.

Wyldewode wrote:Damn! You guys are making me jones for a new laptop. Which I cannot afford if I want to go to Elohimfest this year.

This is going to sound rude to Elohimfest enthusiasts...but given the choice between saving for a new laptop or saving for a trip to meet with Watchers, I'd go for the laptop, heh heh. Depends on what your personal priorities are. (Of course, it may also depend on whether or not SRD would be in attendance.) That's my 2 cents for ya, Wyl.

I haven't cleaned my registry in a long time...so long that I figure it's better to just start fresh and reinstall Windows, when I can be bothered to.

I'm not even going to think about trying to run Vista on my current system.

I have yet to find a Windows registry cleaner as effective as a strong bar magnet.

...sledgehammers may be cathartic, but they make big messes

dw

Matrixman wrote:

Wyldewode wrote:Damn! You guys are making me jones for a new laptop. Which I cannot afford if I want to go to Elohimfest this year.

This is going to sound rude to Elohimfest enthusiasts...but given the choice between saving for a new laptop or saving for a trip to meet with Watchers, I'd go for the laptop, heh heh. Depends on what your personal priorities are. (Of course, it may also depend on whether or not SRD would be in attendance.) That's my 2 cents for ya, Wyl.

I haven't cleaned my registry in a long time...so long that I figure it's better to just start fresh and reinstall Windows, when I can be bothered to.

I'm not even going to think about trying to run Vista on my current system.

Well, SRD is supposed to be there, so that is one factor in my decision. Also, I think I am getting a free airline ticket from a family member, so the trip isn't going to be that expensive. The problem is that I need a better paying job. Since I moved I have to pay about 25% more to live in this place than my prior abode. Also, I am currently commuting 30 miles each way to work, which will cost me at least another $100 in gas each month. That makes things pretty tight for me, and right now a new computer is rather far down the list. Paying off my debt is my highest priority. Second after that is saving for a trip to the UK next year.

Creator wrote:For the technologists amongst us ... a thread to share thoughts about Vista.

My VAOI - VGC-V520G is only two years old. Decent configuration:

Pentium 4 CPU 3.2 GHz HT
1 Gig main memory
250 Gigs hard drive
TV Tuner
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5700 Video Card

Not too shabby for an old PC

I've highlighted the root of your problem there Creator, it looks like you made the exact same mistake I did with Vista, which is that it doesn't get on with old hardware at all well. I may as well post my spec if everyone else is going to:

Athlon +3000XP
1.5GB RAM
120GB + 80GB IDE hard drives
Radeon 9800XT

As you can see, some good-but-ageing hardware and the rig has only very recently started to struggle with the newest games. The main reason for this is the 9800XT, which was absolutely the fastest video card you could buy when it was released in late 2003 (I love the cooler on it; I've seen smaller turbochargers). All this was fine on XP but Vista took serious offence to the XT as well as a couple of features on my mainboard, to the extent that it wouldn't even load the standard VGA driver. I still had a spare 40gb HD with XP on it kicking around (although something had gone wrong with the installation so it was dog slow and I couldn't work out why) so I switched to that while I waited for ATI to update their Vista driver. Drivers are not ATI's strong suit and the next three releases proved no exception, failing to cure my problem. I lost patience and decided to switch back to XP, at which point I found out my sister had borrowed my only legit copy of it and had lost it moving house. Net result, I had to buy a new copy of XP just to get rid of Vista, but it was totally worth it.

This article on the BBC website sums up the pros and cons of switching quite nicely: Falling into the Vista trap

My advice would be to wait until you buy a new machine with Vista on it, as XP in its current form is a very solid OS, if a little inefficient. If you have a computer that's less than 6 months old you probably won't have any problems, but much older than that and you're starting to play with fire.

Stonemaybe, have you ever used AOL Instant Messenger?

For anyone who uses AOL, check for "Viewpoint Media Player" in Add/Remove programs and remove it. It's not a media player, it's an advertisement player. I read that AOL intends to use it to collect people's surfing habits with a view to bombarding them with targeted advertising (==> spyware).

I laughed at the comparison between AOL and The Illearth Stone formerly I'd always called it, "Eh? Oh HELL!!!!" I think it says something that I'm the only member in my family who does not use it and they didn't ask me before they became AOL customers....

As soon as you use any AOL component, Viewpoint will come straight back. It's one of those pieces shaved off the Illearth Stone .... So ... sorry AOL customers; you're lumbered with it.

One program I use to keep my system generally tidy is Ccleaner. It's free. However, there always used to be issues with the Registry cleaning side of it, so that part of it is not recommended. What I like is that you can set up a list of cookies to keep so you don't lose all your forum logins, etc. every time you run it.

If you suspect any spyware/malware issues, then try any forum that's part of the Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals - you're sure to get courteous help and support from folk who have undergone rigorous training in the art of malware removal.

Vista? Well, just like XP it's Microsoft's "Most Secure Operating System Ever". You ought to see the problems that XP has caused in the ASAP community. Say no more

Not that I'm thinking of stones that emanate green wrong, either

Oh .... the AOL browser is merely a heavily customised IE. This means all the viruses, spyware, trojans, etc. written for IE will work under the AOL browser.

A lot of folk are using the free Mozilla Firefox which is more secure simply because it isn't bolted in as an integral part of the OS, thus meaning it doesn't have quite the same level of access to the Windows core as does IE.

Ah - the good 'ole days! My first PC was an XT with ... I was so psyched! ... dual floppy drives. That meant I didn't need to switch disks when I was running those massive games and programs that came with two disks. Upgraded about a year later to a 20M hard drive. "Automenu" was a huge technological step forward, and I nearly died when someone gave me a copy of PC Tools.

Anyway, my desktop was recently getting to the point where I needed to reinstall Windows (every year or two this happens). So I decided to upgrade to Vista. With the exception of a few programs that it didn't support, I thought it was great. Start-up was much faster, and things seemed to run better. Took some getting used to - as does any upgrade. But I thought the improvements were well worth the growing pains.

THEN ... the print spooler started to crash. I searched the web high and low for a solution, but nothing works. The spooler keeps shutting down - so I can't print, can't removed printers, can't add printers, can't do anything along those lines. Spent days fighting with it, trying things that have miraculously helped others in various support discusison groups. I'm going to have to reinstall Windows - and since Vista doesn't support Norton Ghost, I don't have the normal "initial backup" that I would have made after I first got everything working (I would have used a different backup method, but Norton Ghost for Vista is "coming soon"). And I don't have much confidence that reinstalling will work - some people report that the print spooler problem comes back even after reinstall. *sigh*

Oooohhhh!! The "good 'ol days" of writing 6502 assembly language or Z80 machine code .... counting the instructions to make sure the relative branches were in range, and also the machine cycles each loop took to make sure you wrote the code as optimally as possible.

Determining whether to use self-modifying code so you could use this.... in a loop
or whether it was better to use low addresses and use this ...
Now that was the "good old days". They were also the days when programming was .... well, programming

Going back to high school... TRS-80s with NO floppy drives.

CLOAD

then push Play on the casette player.

And I got one of those Timex Sinclair 1000s when they came out (and still have it - I should donate it to the Smithsonian).

And you know ... I could still PRINT WITH THEM! So even the dinosaurs are working better for me than Vista at the moment.