January 22, 2009
Vista ... hiss, boo ... wait, what?
I've been using Vista for nearly a week now, necessitated by the theft of my old (Windows XP) machine. For months I've been railing against Microsoft's hegemony, about the waste of resources that Vista's relentless polling of device drivers represents, about the horror stories that people have told me about problems with software compatibility and so on and so forth. To my surprise, after a week, I'm finding I actually quite like it. Of course, XP would run like the wind on this machine, with its 2.1GHz Turion dual cores and 3Gb of RAM. And, frankly, the UAC is like having a well-meaning but condescending uncle standing at your shoulder: "Are you sure you should be doing that? Do you know who that is? Should you really be talking to them?". It can be irritating running some "legacy" software - Delphi 7 for example (although at six years old, and still perfectly useable, I hate calling it "legacy" as if it's from the 19th century). There's a tendency for some icons to disappear from the system tray - the OpenVPN GUI, for example, hides like a scared rabbit if I close the lid and resume, and press "cancel" instead of reconnecting to my VPN, meaning I have to open task manager, hunt the rabbit down and shoot it in the head before resurrecting it. Sorry, that got a bit Gothic, didn't it? But there are some nice touches - I like the sidebar, and having the Bluetooth modem as standard is a nice touch - I grappled with that for a long time under XP. And I like Aero - the visual task switching is very nice, and something that PowerToys under XP tried to do, but didn't quite work with IE sessions. No, on balance, I can get used to Vista. I'll be sorry to say goodbye to XP. I know it was getting a bit long in the tooth, but every year it got more stable. I have a newer. prettier flame now, even if she thinks 2002 is a long time ago.
Posted by daen at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)
August 17, 2004
XP SP2
Gaagh. I didn't want to post anything about SP2, but ...
Tim Mullen wrote this upbeat appraisal of XP SP2 at the Register.
XP SP2 support centre.
Here's the KB list of XP SP2 broken apps.
Here's the KB list of XP SP2 apps with "altered states" after SP2.
Vendor contact details : A-K L-P Q-Z
Posted by daen at 10:55 AM
May 05, 2004
VBScript date fns
Posted by daen at 03:03 PM
February 16, 2004
Microsoft's contribution to the Open Source community ...
Slashdot has a thread running on the leaked Windows source (Microsoft Source Follow-Up). Someone asked whether anyone had actually built the code ...
Gandalf: No! Don't ever use it!
Frodo: How do we know it's source to the One OS of the Dark Lord?
Gandalf tosses a CD-R into the burner, and burns Windows.Source.Code.w2k.nt4.wxp.tar onto it. When the CD is done, there are glowing fiery letters on it.
Frodo : I can't read the fiery letters.
Gandalf : There are few who can. The language is that of Redmond, which I will not utter here. In the common tongue, it says "One OS To Rule Them All, One OS To Find Them, One OS To Bring Them All And With The NDA Bind Them"
Frodo: Take the source code Gandalf!
Gandalf : Noo! Do not tempt me with it! I dare not take it! Not even to keep it safe! You must understand Frodo, that I would be tempted to use this source code, for good. To disclose hidden API's, help the WINE project. But through me, all of open source would be tainted, and the LawyerWraiths of The Dark Lord will sure destroy us.
Frodo : But it cannot stay here!
Gandalf : No, no it can't.
Frodo : What must I do?
Gandalf : It must be sent to the fires of /dev/null, where it will be undone, and we will be kept safe from the Lawyers of Evil.
So remember folks, don't download it, or look at it, or attempt to build it! It is evil, and answers only to the hand of The Dark One.
Posted by daen at 02:10 PM