Windows Vista

A while ago I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my new fast computer. I installed Vista on a separate internal SATA hard drive separate from my XP drive (IDE). In order to swap between operating systems I do have to go into the system BIOS and tell it to use the SATA (Vista) or IDE (XP) drive to boot from instead of putting both on the same drive and using the startup manager to switch. I don't know what is safer....but so far this seems to be working. I'm a little paranoid about putting both operating systems on the same drive but I suppose eventually that would keep the computer cooler having fewer drives inside.

There are things I really like about Vista and things I really don't like. The graphics are great. My games play very smoothly on the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor in conjunction with the nVidia 8500GT running DirectX 10. I think it looks better than the same hardware on Windows XP using DirectX 9.0c. I've been playing Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X. All look really good. Might look better on a better graphics card, but not worth the extra $150 to me for as little as I get to play.

Other things I like about Vista are pretty minor but cool. A search within the start menu is nice. If you're looking to launch a program that isn't in the 'START' menu, instead of doing the old Start:All Programs then hunting around for it, you can actually type in the name of the program you're looking for and it'll show up. Nice! Also when you want to rename a file in the finder, you can click on it and instead of it highlighting the entire name including the file extension, it only highlights the name....not the extension. Makes renaming files a lot faster and easier...and safer!

Vista has a much faster install time than Windows XP, and a much faster repair time as well. In my attempts to resurrect my XP system drive, I corrupted something on my Vista drive and it wouldn't boot. I was able to 'repair' by booting off the Vista install CD and the repair went very quickly unlike a repair in XP which basically reinstalls the OS.

Things that are really annoying are the lame administrator security alerts. "You need administrator rights to do this, click here to continue". So you click there and it does what it was supposed to. The problem is that I only have one user account on the computer....and it's an administrator. So I already HAVE administrator privileges. Annoying. I haven't done much research into this but maybe there is a way to disable these alerts...probably not but it would be nice!

I'm using the Windows Vista Aero 'theme' since my system is beefy enough to handle it. It looks great and all the windows have these zoom.fade effects which look nice when windows open or close. The Alt+Tab interface is cool, instead of having tiny thumbnails of the open windows to switch between, the sample windows are pretty big so you can actually see what you are choosing. Also when you mouse over the open windows down in the task bar, a decent sized thumbnail shows up down there too. Makes it a little easier to see what window you are about to open.

I haven't explored all the features in Vista and probably should go through the "what's new" or even the "welcome to Vista" stuff.....eventually I will. But for now, these are the things I noticed right off the bat.

NEW issues

My system drive for Windows XP on my new computer (old hard drive) died earlier this week. I've been working on it here and there as I get time trying to resurrect the drive so I didn't have to reinstall everything from scratch. I had a feeling it was a partition table issue from past problems with this drive so I bought a program from a company called Easeus that was supposed to repair Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, and Boot Sectors. After several attempts, I could not get it to come back to life. I did a 'surface test' and discovered it did indeed have some bad sectors so I counted it a loss and started over from scratch.

I didn't lose any of my important data since I use a program called GoodSync to backup all my important stuff on other drives. I'm getting pretty good and fast at installing Windows XP and all my programs in the right order...I've done it a lot the past several months. I am now down to the last batch of programs to install and activate (Adobe CS3 Production Studio) then I'll use a utility that came with my motherboard to backup my entire system drive. It's supped to back up the entire drive in a way that will make it easily recoverable in the event of catastrophic system failure....except if your drive physically goes bad.

One of the things I've been looking into is setting up a RAID1 (mirrored volume) for all my data (not programs or operating system). However, I've learned that you can't do that on Windows XP. So I'm again using GoodSync to back up one of my data drives to another identical drive so in the event of one drive failing, I'll have a backup immediately available. It takes a little more work to do it this way, but since I can't do a RAID1, this will have to do.

That's all for now. The computer has been running very well until this recent drive failure and I am very happy with my purchase and computer building success. I've been seeing some increased performance with games when plying using the Windows Vista operating system...I'll talk about that next time.