Now go out and be productive!
Vista SP1 is officially out. I’m finally getting around to installing it because lets face it, Microsoft has a poor track record with releases. First off, its not a quick install, it does warn you up front that it may take up to an hour to install, and boy was it right, it took close to a hour to install. SP1 installed itself successfully without any problems which is good and even better everything ran fine. I do notice there are no longer any consent dialogs for file operations which speeds it up. Other than that, disappointingly there are no other obvious signs of SP1. I am sure it addressed many security updates and fixes, but I am not blown away. Still, I recommend you install the latest SP1. It can only help for the most part and only hurts a little.
Hurrah!, I actually found something in Vista that was not previous present in Windows XP and that is actually useful. Vista Ultimate includes Windows Calendar, a stand-alone calendar that supports To-do items, appointments, and reminders. Best of all, it supports the standard calendar format (.ics) that way you can import, download, and share calendars online. Previously I blogged here about how Mozilla had a stand-alone calendar application that was worthy of consideration, but was still in beta. I have to admit I switched to the Windows Calendar, its just faster and more stable than than Mozilla Sunbird. Windows Calendar also links to your Windows Contacts, it can be improved by making more options configurable such as the layout, its very simplistic. However, I find the calendar serves its purpose well. If you don’t like Microsoft or don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket you may stay away, but when it comes with the OS your doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least try it.
It can be a major headache to tweak and adjust Vista for performance, especially when they changed, I mean improved all the setting locations. I found a very helpful software that will do this for you, Tweak VI. The Basic edition has everything you need, but if you want to get more technical there are various other versions. I found the utility saved a lot of time, I only wished I knew about it earlier.
It must show a lot about the human condition to become tolerant of any evil once it becomes the mundane. I have actually become less hateful of Vista. I can’t say that I love it, but once you have all the drivers updated and all your software running, its less noticeable. At this point I have succumbed to their diabolical plan that its much more of a hassle to revert back to XP than to stay with Vista. Sadly, there is still yet a feature in Vista that I can rave about, the best I can say is Vista is probably more secure.
The Hardware
If you have been reading up on Vista and the state of gaming, my issues will sound familiar, but there’s nothing like sharing misery, chuckling over mistakes, and in the end you may even learn something new.
To kick it off right, I needed new hardware. Vista Aero is a huge hog and to play the latest and greatest games with DirectX 10 (more on later how much that sucked) I need the latest graphics card. I went cheap with the CPU and went with the dual core, but I bought the Gigabyte P35 motherboard that would support the latest Penryn 45nm Intel chips. I bought 2 Gb of ram and the current champ of video cards, NVidia’s 8800 GT. TechReport has a good system guide here. Slightly off topic, in order to save some cash I decided to reuse Dell’s case, a BIG mistake. Dell has the greatest deals on systems, however to prevent you from cannibalizing their parts they have a lot of non-standard parts. The case fans on Dell have non-standards plug wiring such that if you plug them into any other motherboard they do not work. The motherboards do not have the standard screws into the case, this was my gotcha, double check between your new motherboard and the case there is no short circuit. After a lot of hours, $30 dollars poorer, and more pissed off at Dell, I did get it all to work.
Newegg did the job, no major complaints, parts did come in two separate shipments. Its another story on getting it over clocked and stable, but next time we actually get to how Vista doesn’t play nicely with Crysis.
