a new year

Ah, a new year of computer adventures just ahead of me. Been playing around with Windows Vista Home Premium because the Call of Duty 2 Game won't run on my Windows XP Home version for some reason. So, it looks like Vista is a little more stable (and should be even more with the release of Service Pack 1 in First Quarter 2008). Haven't been using my Mac Mini much except for playing this old school game called Escape Velocity: Override. A little depressed right now because business was extremely slow for December which is completely opposite to all my predictions. Well, I have hope that January will be better than last year's January. Oh yeah, I just remembered that my business is now a year old! Yay me!

enough!

some useful discoveries:
-doing the file and settings transfer worked when done over my home network
-the printer sharing was messed up because the drivers that worked in vista were, of course, incompatible with any XP computers that tried to access said printer over the network
-IE7 didn't know what to do when I tried to make a printable version of Google calender

After several other frustrations and a Power Supply that I had to fix, I decided to totally disassemble and reassemble, adding two more hardrives in the process. Now, I'm installing an OEM version of Home and perhaps later I'll have a dual-boot system (if vista allows that)

All in all, this experience will serve me in the future, when vista might actually be ready for the everyday consumer... right now, it makes me think of Steve Wozniak's quote, "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"

more complaints about vista

I think this has been mentioned in articles about Vista before it was even released but the security features are overkill! I have to click through three confirmation dialogues just to delete a file.

Another annoyance that was no surprise was when I used windows update to search for vista drivers for my unidentified hardware. Well, just like in XP, doing that search is pretty much a waste of time and returned no results. I'll have to go to each of the manufacturer's websites to find all the vista drivers. On the other hand, I have to give kudos to Microsoft for keeping me in business. I can already see me helping customers getting there new computers working correctly with this new operating system.

One other thing I did this morning was go to some less-than-reputable sites to see if I could get the machine infected with some adware or something. I was again not surprised to find out that the pop-ups still happened.

You know, I really wonder what they do up their in Redmond, Washington. I really think the problem with the Microsoft Empire is that of hubris. Like any empire, success breeds complacency and eventually ossifies into obsolescence.