Category: – Vista Diary

Windows Vista, operating system of testers tearing their hair out everywhere. What am I going to do with it, what’s wrong with it, what are its implications and, asking the most important question, why won’t Creative release decent drivers for it?

Goodbye, Vista kill switch

~ Inquisitor

In SP1, it’s gone.

They aren’t removing the other WGA stuff – in fact, they’re making it more annoying – but the kill switch (knocking the system down to Internet Explorer only) for pirate copies was almost certainly a step too far, especially since it could very occasionally malfunction. Much fairer to simply have a bunch of annoying warnings rather than the nuclear measure, and a sign of exactly how much SP1 should improve the operating system.

[As an aside, exactly why is it that people bash the User Account Control system when UAC is only required in the same places that the sudo type equivalent would be on Mac OS X or Linux – that is, for changing important system settings or installing applications? On a normal Linux system, actually, you have to run sudo more times to configure and install stuff than you ever have to click the ‘Accept’ box (or type a password if you’re operating user/administrator) in UAC on Vista, so why Slashdigg et al keep on bashing Vista based on UAC is somewhat perplexing. The only problem with UAC is that certain people in the ancient past wrote applications that demanded full administrator permission to run because of poor programming, and Microsoft finally called them on it. Just a thought, anyway.]

Vista diary #1: Hardware hassles and hard choices

~ Inquisitor ~ 3 Comments

I’ve just installed Vista RC1 on my main desktop machine, and for the first time it’s speedy enough and almost ready to be my main operating system. I’m typing this in Vista IE7 now.

Vista has had a bit of a troubled history for me. I have an Athlon-64 3500+ homebuild machine, with 1GB RAM, a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 I paid quite a bit of money for a few years ago, and an NVIDIA 6800GT graphics card – something which should be fast enough for anything much thrown at it (it’s certainly fast enough for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at my LCD monitor’s resolution with anti-aliasing on.) Yet previous Vista builds have been horrendously slow, swapping to disc or just unusable.

Much of this seems to have been the fault of two companies: NVIDIA and Creative Labs. NVIDIA have fixed their problems and now their graphics drivers are quick, stable and very much up to the task. Creative have not, and it’s entirely their fault – they have decided not to write any Vista drivers at all for the Soundblaster Live! series, including the 5.1 Platinum I own, in an obvious attempt to make us all buy Audigys and X-Fis (too bad their Audigy and X-Fi Vista drivers don’t work properly, if at all, according to everyone who’s tried them). Microsoft themselves have tried to cajole Creative into writing the needed drivers, with no effect. The end result is that I had to use the kludge that is the kX drivers, and they don’t work too well on Vista.

No more. Now I’ve replaced my long-cable hi-fi link with Xbox Media Center, I no longer need to have two front outputs – one in the rear to my hi-fi, one in the front for my headphones. Now I can plug my headphones directly into the rear, and use XBMC to play music through the hi-fi in the next room. And because I can do that, I can use my NForce4 on-board audio, of which NVIDIA’s RC1 drivers work (if a little minor-buggily).

So when I was swapping a TV tuner today, I yanked out my Live 5.1; the last act in a long struggle, the very final straw for me being the fact that Creative despite all the complaining have refused to change their position (whilst their Audigy and X-Fi drivers still don’t work properly for everyone). So, goodbye Creative; I’ve bought a lot of your stuff over the years, but you’ll never see a penny of my money again. Good riddance to you all.