Tag: vista

Get it while you can

~ Inquisitor

Maplin are offering an unusually good cheap soundcard right now: £19.99 gets you what is effectively the Chaintech AV-710 in a white box with a two-page manual and an old copy of PowerDVD. I’ve just got one from my local branch in Edinburgh (code A46CC); there’s still a few on the shelf.

This is properly 24/96 capable, has a high quality Wolfson DAC on the rear surround out, and has absolutely no Creative Labs circuitry on board (hence, it works fine on Vista.) And since there’s no clicking noise on my headphones whenever I do anything with my hard drives, it’s already some way superior to the Realtek onboard AC-97 and worth every penny.If you, like me, have no need for EAX et al but want quality music out, get one while Maplin are still doing them.

Here’s a useful setup guide.

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.]