vista
Finally got Aero Glass on Paige's Dell
May 09 2009 04:41 PM Filed in: Microsoft
Paige purchased a new Dell desktop probably about 6
months ago, it came with Windows Vista Home Premium
and she upgraded to an ATI Radeon graphics card with
256 MB RAM. I helped with the initial set up, mostly
to de-crappify the machine, and one thing that has
never worked from day one is the fancy Aero Glass
theme. If you went to rate the machine, the process
would crash. She was stuck with the crappy Vista
Basic theme. Why would Dell sell a machine, that out
of the box, would not work as advertised? Last night
I was sitting at her machine and I decided to update
the ATI driver. A new driver was released in March of
this year. After installing that I was able to rate
the machine, which rated at 3.8, high enough to
handle Aero Glass. I restarted the desktop window
manager and she now had the Aero Glass theme running.
It’s not the greatest theme in the world, and I
really don’t understand why you need a powerful
machine to run it, but at least now she had it
working on her Dell.
|
Why does Vista take up so much disk space?
Mar 25 2009 06:08 PM Filed in: Microsoft
I had wiped out my Boot Camp partition on my MacBook
because I found I was never booting into it.
Silverlight 3 was released in beta last week, and I
wanted a machine on which to play around with it, so
I set up a partition again. I gave my Vista Boot Camp
partition 32 GB of space. After a fresh install of
Vista was complete it reported that I have 14 GB
left. Why on earth would an OS take up over 15 GB of
space? I realize disk space is cheap these days, but
isn’t that a little ridiculous? It’s not like it
comes with all sorts of pre-installed software. I can
see how Vista wouldn’t work well with NetBooks. Paige
got a Dell Mini netbook, and it has a 32 GB SSD drive
in it. It would suck if over half of her hard drive
was taken up right from the beginning just by the OS
install.
Thoughts on Vista
Oct 27 2008 10:33 PM Filed in: Microsoft
As I mentioned in an earlier post I installed
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook a
couple weeks back. Now that I’ve had a chance to use
it a little, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.
So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.
Likes:
1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.
Dislikes:
1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.
I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.
I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.
So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.
Likes:
1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.
Dislikes:
1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.
I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.
What?!? I installed Vista? On a MacBook!
Yes, you read that title correctly. I installed the
latest version of the Microsoft OS, Windows Vista, on
my MacBook. I didn’t install it in a virtual machine
using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, I actually used
BootCamp and installed it directly on my MacBook in a
separate partition. I did this for two reasons.
Number one: I didn’t use VMWare Fusion or Parallels
because my MacBook is one of the old ones that can
only support up to 2 GB or RAM, so I would only be
able to give my virtual machine around 1 GB and still
have a responsive Mac. Windows Vista wouldn’t be a
happy camper under 1 GB of RAM, especially since the
reason I installed it is for reason number two.
Number two: I realize at the end of the day, even
though I love Apple and my Mac, the thing that brings
home the paycheck is Microsoft development. We are
getting into serious development at work now using
.NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0. I need to have a
machine at home that I can use to work on, and I’d
rather not have to lug around a laptop back-and-forth
to work every day.
Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.
I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.
Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.
I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.