Windows Vista Gone Gold

Post by **TheCatt** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 2:58 pm

They've helpfully (not) preinstalled Norton security suite, which will stop functioning in 90 days unless I fork over some money.

That annoys the hell out of me. If I wanted to sacrifice half my machine's performance, and introduce random bugs and untraceable problems, I would have written code that eats every other CPU cycle and trips exceptions every so often.

Fortunately, Norton uninstalls cleanly and easily (albeit slowly) from Vista, which in an improvement from the past, when dislodging it involved artillery shells.

This is so true it hurts.

My new car PC (the aforementioned broken laptop) is a clean install of Windows XP Pro, with no antivirus/firewall/etc whatsoever.

Damn it's fast despite being 2.5 years old.

Post by **TPRJones** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 4:38 pm

For the first time ever, I've started having problems with Norton. Starting to lock up at random.

Time to nuke it and start over.

Post by **GORDON** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 4:44 pm

Difference is, I think, you probably chose to install Norton.

I hate having to uninstall crap right after a fresh install.

Post by **TPRJones** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 4:47 pm

Indeed. I like this quote from his write-up:

I have always taken the position that if I, as the owner of the machine, am not the FINAL authority on what is to run, and under what terms, then I consider my machine to be under the control of some other entity, whose intent and hostility is unknown.

This is my attitude, too. Anything on my computer that is not under my control is a weapon of the enemy. My computer, my way, end of story.

This is part of why I don't care for Macintosh systems, and why Vista pisses me off so much.

Post by **Vince** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 7:01 pm

I'm really not liking Windows Live OneCare on Vista. The CD/DVD backup had issues on XP. Dislodging the CD/DVD control from the OS kernel in Vista seems to have fixed the issues there. Fix one issue, break something else.

Now the firewall in OneCare doesn't work. Well, I guess I should say that it works like it roided up blocking everything. I've jst disabled it and use the standard Windows firewall and everything seems okay. I just fire up the OneCare firewall once every week or two to see if they fixed their shit yet.

Post by **TheCatt** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 8:46 pm

So you upgraded on a personal machine or a work machine?

Post by **Vince** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 6:59 pm

Personal. They probably won't be upgrading the work PC's until well into next year.

IT department's so big and segregated. Not what I'm used to. I miss getting to play with all the toys.

Post by **TheCatt** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 7:05 pm

So you actually pay and upgrade? Which version? What type of hardware? How's it run?

I was thinking of buying a new lappy, but reformatting and throwing XP on it so far.

Post by **Cakedaddy** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 7:36 pm

Some laptops still sell with XP loaded. Hurry!!

Post by **TheCatt** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:25 pm

Cakedaddy wrote:Some laptops still sell with XP loaded. Hurry!!

I pretty much only buy Dell.

I've bought Gateway, HP, and Asus before. Only the Dells have really stood the test of time.

In fact, one Dell was about 3 years old when we replaced it 2.5 years ago. I put it in my car as a car-puter. My wife broke the screen of her laptop, so I took the car PC out to use for her temporarily. The fact that it's 5.5 years old, and spent more than a year in the car and has no major issues means something to me.

They may not be the flashiest, but every Dell laptop I've had has been well-made, and the best value at the time.

Post by **Vince** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:40 pm

TheCatt wrote:So you actually pay and upgrade? Which version? What type of hardware? How's it run?

I was thinking of buying a new lappy, but reformatting and throwing XP on it so far.

Yeah, I payed for it. About the only thing I don't pay for are business apps that I hardly ever use but still have on my PC for those "every couple of months" that I need them.

Running on my intel 6600 dual core machine w/ 2gb ram and a 250 gb serial hd. Running Ultimate. My "Windows Experience Index" is a 4.4 (that's a new perfomance meter self check sort of thing Vista has... 5 being the highest possible I think). Runs pretty well. Not choking from a horsepower perspective, though I have noticed there are times when it seems the OS is expecting a response from an app or piece of hardware or service and it isn't getting it as fast as it thinks it should and everything just sort of freezes for a couple of seconds while it waits on the response. For instance, a web page may be trying to launch an image from the page (through a script, not an embedded image) and the whole thing just becomes non-responsive until it the code fires off.

The problems I'm seeing are more along the lines of "Okay, they're really going to have to do something about that" rather than "okay, this is unusable". I'm not using it for Media Center. Have my old PC pretty much as a stand alone for that.

My scanner doesn't have drivers for Vista, but it's 9 years old and I was actually kind of shocked that XP recognized it.