Tag: vista Posts

Last Vista Bash, Promise

 Journal

I just read this while surfing the internet – that in a comparison of Windows XP SP3 against Vista SP1, XP blew it completely out of the water: Vista’s first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system’s performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor. Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds. 80 seconds in Vista. 35 seconds in XP. It can be yours for only $200, plus associated hardware upgrades. Oh, and while I’m at it, check this out. Do you have a windows […]

This Has Got to Hurt

 Journal

I just read an article online that did a comparison between a bunch of different machines running Windows Vista. You know who the winner was? A Macbook Pro. The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows. Hard to believe Microsoft and their distributors had all their shit together once.

The Vista that Broke the Camel's Back

Technology

Most of you that know me have undoubtedly seem me cursing at my computer furiously this past week or punching my laptop from time to time. The reason for this sudden change in behaviour stems from my recent installation of Windows Vista. Somehow, that whole process turned a pretty decent laptop into something completely unusable. So today, while trying to edit some photos at Northern Voice, I realized that I just couldn’t go on using my laptop the way it was. Everything was really slow and most applications crashed from time to time (especially Photoshop). Since I’m about to leave on vacation, and I really need a laptop to take with me, I debated spending the first day of my vacation reinstalling XP on my laptop. Which would obviously suck, but something really needed to be done. And then, looking around at my peers in the Forest Sciences Center at […]

My First And Last Week With Windows Vista

Technology

I’m officially going to blog about my frustration with Windows Vista so far. If you were following last week, I decided (stupidly) that I would upgrade my laptop from windows XP to windows Vista. First, the whole upgrade procedure took on the order of four hours, and it wasn’t exact smooth all the time. The progress meters were hopelessly broken, and the pre-check that it does to make sure you can actually install vista properly got it wrong. One thing that bothers me right away is that you can no longer install Vista on the same partition as another OS. I’m not really sure why this is, because with Windows XP, you could do this. For example, you could have one version of XP in C:\windows, and another in C:\winxp. What’s funny is this feature is really only useful for an operating system that you have to reinstall periodically, which […]

Installing Vista

Technology

So, I was multitasking at work today, installing Windows Vista on my laptop, and doing some work on my desktop machine. I thought the upgrade process would be simple, but instead it was a huge headache. First, Windows Vista Installer analyzed my whole machine and told me I was good to go. Then, I start installing it and it goes “wait a sec, just joking — you gotta remove all this software first before you can install Vista.” So, I uninstall Nero, my anti-virus program and a DVD RAM drive thing that I’ve never used. Install, take 2. The next part of the process is rather uneventful, but I have to say that the progress meters in the installer are terrible. First, they aren’t really tied to time or anything useful. It will hover at 2% for 30 minutes, then just up to 15% in about 3 seconds. Second, they […]