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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.

1. Guitar Hero
2. Vista
3. $100 laptop
4. Google Android
5. Facebook
6. IPhone
7. Crysis
8. VMWare
9. Tase me, bro!
10. Nvidia 8800 GT

My brand new computer rig is running, now to test it with the mother of all games, Crysis. Lets skip past the part where I had to update the nvidia drivers, download Vista updates, patch the games, and speed up the fan so the 8800 GT graphics card does not overheat. Crysis, is a very beautiful game, its ultra realistic, even not on the highest setting. The initial game play was engaging with the armor suit capable of special abilities. However, the biggest drawback is even though the environment is reactive, the AI is intelligent, nothing about the game is intriguing or draws you in for more. I was having more fun playing Gears of War than Crysis. Even though the graphics was amazing I felt it lacked the imagination and emotional impact of even an older game like Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Is Crysis a must own? No, I would not upgrade my machine just for Crysis, wait a bit.

3Dmark06 score: 11514

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.

Mozilla hasn’t stopped innovating since they came out with their Internet Explorer browser killer, Firefox. The people at Mozilla now bring you a few more new products.

In the music category we have Mozilla Songbird, a media player mashed-up with the web. I hate to hate on Microsoft more, but there Windows Media Player has only gotten worse with each new iteration. WMP is slow and bloated with Urge music download. The interface is hard to use with the disappearing menu bar. Upon installation Songbird was easy to use, I just scanned my folder for music files and I was up. The current beta version 0.3 is a little sluggish but the interface is intuitive and clean to use. I eagerly await the the final product.

In the calendering and task management category they have released a stand alone version of their Lightning plugin for Firefox in the form of Sunbird. I personally like the stand alone application more as I like to work offline and I don’t want to maintain my information online. Its sad to report but version 0.7 is still a little buggy, I had some issues with setting the time correctly and the auto-update feature. Again, I still recommend it, but be aware it is not fully 100% complete.

The other product that is standard is a mail program, Mozilla has Thunderbird It supports tagging, message threads, junk mail filters, and searching. To give Microsoft a break, Outlook is fast and fairly easy to use, but functionality wise it is falling behind Google mail. Microsoft needs to step up, they have been complacent for too long. We the consumer are no longer locked, we should choose with our software until Microsoft does better.

I have a lot of randomly download music files that are unorganized. I wanted to organize them better, by sorting and renaming them all neatly. I definitely did not want to do it manually as it was a lot of files. I googled for some good applications that would do just that, sadly there does not seem to be one that stands above the crowd, at least I didnt find one.
Tag&Rename- Mp3 tag editor
Smart MP3 Renamer
Ideal MP3 Music Sorter

I can’t really recommend one strongly, however the one that I ended up using was Ideal MP3 Music Sorter. Ideal was the best of the worst. On there website a requirement for installation is the .NET Framework and it shows. It required Windows Installer and once installed it ran slowly and erratically. The good point was it was full of features though presented in a confusing way. It ended up transferring all my files into its own directory even though I thought I specified my own directory. In the end, it needs more work, some one has to develop something better!

I finally got a chance to play with the new IPhone. I was impressed with its small size and responsiveness. It definitely had the cool factor. The touch screen was sensitive and accurate. Web surfing was fast with its ability to rotate the screen. The down side of course is the price and the single provider and no gps. I feel the disadvantage far out weighs the positive. For a dedicated mp3 player there are far more choices out there. As a phone you don’t really need all these features, once the cool factor wears off, its just another device in your pocket. Of course if your the lucky few with money to burn, its a good buy. Then again you can instead buy a Mac mini and you can stream meda to your tv.

Update: Read why The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face, strong recommendation for the Nokia E70.