Coincidentially I got a release version of Vista yesterday, and was considering installing it (on mu XP it has been running buggy, crashing both Mozilla AND Firefox, as well as a number of other eccentricies (Eudora stopped working FREX). May wait now...
Damon. ------------------------------------------------------------ Damon Agretto [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum." http://www.geocities.com/garrand.geo/index.html Now Building: Trumpeter's Marder I auf GW 38(h) Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld. ------------------------------------------------------------ Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld. -----Original Message----- From: "Robert Seeberger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 18:01:56 To:"Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: PC Software - prices high, little choice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 3:33 PM Subject: Re: PC Software - prices high, little choice > Andrew said: > >> To you, maybe. To put it another way, I take a very engineering >> view, >> rather than a scientific one to technology. > > Well, that sounds like the sort of attitude that Mac people I know > take. OS X, for example, has the advantage over Windows that it's > actually been properly engineered. Until Vista, even Microsoft > didn't have any idea about the dependencies between pieces of > Windows code and by their own admission were utterly appalled when > they tried to map those dependencies(*). Software engineering is > something that seems foreign to Microsoft - it appears that they > solve problems by throwing large numbers of developers at a problem > and slipping release dates until it appears to more or less work. > Apple, on the other hand, seem to go out of their way to constantly > improve their software designs (and I'm clearly not just talking > about externally visible things like user interfaces). > I'm beta-testing Vista [Ultimate] RC1. As of last week it was buggy and problem ridden. All my media players (basically anything that could play a video or music file) were broken. None of the games worked. For the most part any program that was a problem would start and then crash which initiated a slightly time consuming reporting program. I even saw about a half second of a BSOD before an out-of-the-blue reboot (pun intended). I was chatting to William last week in the chatroom about Vista and the problems I saw, and he suggested a nifty program for viewing vid files that seemed to work, but when I tried to watch a movie the sound failed. Lots of problems initially. Last Friday when I got home everything (with one exception I address below) in Vista (that I had had problems with or have so far looked at) was working perfectly. Media files played without glitches of any kind and the games all worked just fine. An update during the early afternoon had fixed every problem I had encountered The games I speak of are the games MS provides, you know.....Freecell, Spider Solitaire and the like. The games are updated and very pretty. A really nice addition is the new chess program. I'm not a good chess player and I only won 1 of the three games I played (and that game was grueling and hard fought for me), but a player with better skills than mine will likely find it suitable for quick pick-up games and its inclusion is likely to increase the popularity of chess for the average home users who would balk at purchasing a chess program. There is also a very nice MahJong game included and I can hardly win on the easier of the 6 boards provided. Vista's networking is greatly improved over XP and I look forward to some upcoming helper programs MS is providing in the next few months. Security has improved slightly it seems, but only time can falsify that. My only serious gripe is that Vista broke Windows One Care and that was a program I depended on. MS was nice enough to provide users with suitable (and free) substitutes for the time being til the issues are addressed, but I like WOC and want it back working on my PC. Outlook Express is dead. It is replaced by Microsoft Windows Mail and is much more like Outlook than the old Express version. (Matter of fact, let me know how my emails are received by your mail program. I'm interested in knowing if the parsing is improved over Outlook Express) Visually, Vista is full of surprises. It is set up to be more fully "themeable" and some of the tricks like fading transparent windows that flip as they close are as beautiful as they are useless. I'm sure you will be glad to know that there are no animated dogs, pieces of paper or paperclips to bug the crap out of you. This time they went more for functional than cute. One of the neater doodads seen in Vista is when you mouse-over an item in the taskbar a small window that fully reiterates the referred to window appears. So if you have a movie playing in a window that is reduced to the taskbar, you can actually watch the movie in the small box that appears. It is fairly handy when doing several things at once. Vista has some fairly hefty requirements. You need a GB or more of memory and a moderately new video card is required. I have a Geoforce FX 5200 with 128 megs of memory and it is just barely enough to do what Vista wants it to do. My 1 GB of memory is adequate, but I expect that 2 GB would be an improvement. My P4 3.2 Ghz is more than adequate. I expect that a dual core processor with 2 GB of memory and a nice vid card with 512 MB of onboard memory will make Vista scream with pleasure. So far, after the initial crapola bugs were fixed, Vista seems to be a great improvement over XP. If I get a chance to get the RTM version, I'll let you know if there are any changes for better or worse. xponent All Betaed Out Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
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