Boooo! Hiss! Windows Vista….
… blows. You can blow me too Bill Gates. It’s a horrible copy of a much better OS - Apple’s OX 10.4.X
My great adventure with Windows Vista Ultimate Beta Release Candidate 2 was greeted with a 4 GB download that I promptly burned to a DVD on June 10.
I figured the perfect candidate would be to use my Dell Inspiron 700m (which sports an integrated Intel 82855 GME graphics card) since it’s not been used much since I acquired my sporty Dell Inspiron 1505 (some staggering specs, 2 GHz Pentium M, 2 GB Ram, 256 MB video ram, etc etc..$1,100).
I figured I’d do what everyone else and their dog is going to do and that is install as an upgrade. Mistake number 1. After a brutal download (four hours on my 8 MB download pipe) it still took 2 hours to install. I should’ve had a clue when it took 5 mins to boot. And then surprise surprise - application conflict after application conflict.
So blew away my drive, reinstalled again, decently speedier, no application conflicts, but the integrated video card was not speeding things up. Still kind of sluggish. And now, it wouldn’t shut down when I wanted it to (what is this an Easter Egg back to Windows 95/98/ME?).
So on to mistake number 2 - I spent money for a beta - I usually never do this but I was itching to try Vista on my nice new shiny Dell 1505 Core Duo with it’s giant video card. So I managed to find an internal SATA drive for $64.00 at Microcenter - but it’s only 5400 RPM. Bah it’s just a test. So I gingerly removed my existing 80 GB drive, tucked it away in a safe place, formatted the new drive, installed Vista, and an hour later I’m working away with Vista. Aerio is kind of cool. But what’s this… my video memory is being reported as only 128 MB. Me thinks a bug. So I download the latest beta drivers from ATI, no dice.. still 128 MB. And worse, I have this Windows 95/98/ME bug.. I can’t shut this one down.
I’m running Windows XP for a while longer me thinks. And stangely, since Windows Vista looks a lot like Apple OS 10.4.X - why bother? I’ve got a perfectly good Mac iBook collecting dust in a closet.