Thursday, August 14, 2008
Windows Vista - It's good and yet it sucks?
I constantly hear two camps when it comes to Windows Vista: It either works well for you or it doesn’t. I couldn’t figure out the huge disparity until now. Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I never read it anywhere, so it’s my own personal observation…
Basically, it’s like this: Vista is great and fairly solid on machines that were designed to run it. Vista is an unstable dung heap on computers that were upgraded and not originally running Vista.
My laptop, which isn’t a year old yet, came with Vista on it, and I have yet to see it crash once. Well, it sort of froze during a shutdown once, but that’s it. Everything I’ve plugged into it (which admittedly isn’t much) has worked flawlessly and without the need for external drivers. Aside from having to re-learn where everything is in this operating system, I’ve been fairly happy with it. This was my first and only experience with Windows Vista at the time, and overall it was quite positive.
Enter my media center project. I upgraded my 7-year old Dell Dimension 4300 - gave it a faster processor, better graphics card, etc. You can read all about that in prevous posts. The last thing I did was install Vista onto it. Now, it doesn’t crash constantly, but it’s nowhere near as stable as when I had XP on it. The good thing is that the Media Center software (part of Vista Premium) works beautifully, and we are able to play Netflix streaming movies (which wouldn’t work with XP Media Center 2004 SP3). HOWEVER it seems to freeze a lot during the Netflix streaming. What the hell is Netflix doing that is causing so much grief with the latest OSes? Or maybe it’s my video card… that’s possible too. I’ve also seen Vista crash for no apparent reason from normal operations.
With all that going on, there’s no way this media center is going to replace my Tivo. So for now I just load movies into it and we use it as a movie repository as well as a Netflix streaming movie player. Later on I’m just going to go and buy a pre-built media center. It’ll save me the trouble of figuring out all the stupid things that go wrong when I’m trying to build it myself. It really is a time-suck, not to mention causes me to ramble on incessantly about the process on this blog.
To end on a positive note, I was surprised at how much more readable text is on the TV screen when using Windows Vista. On the same screen resolution using the same video card, it was barely readable in XP. It’s nice to do computer operations on it without having to get up and walk over to the monitor at the desk. At some point we can probably get rid of the monitor altogether.
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Categories: • Random acts of geekery