Everyone’s pipes work, except the plumbers.

Such is the state of my home PC. It has drips, leaks, and clogs. I have put off upgrades, even though there are minor hardware failures. Motherboard RAM slots: one of four has failed. So, a quarter Gig of RAM sits on my desk instead in the machine. Worst of all, as of late my video card seems to have become a little decrepit. Frame rate is way down regardless of settings. Fix it, You say! Hey, I do this all day long.

I tell you this, so you know my PC is ready for the wrecking ball, anyway. This leads us to the point of this tale: Who would put some buggy release of Microsoft’s yet-to-be-released OS on a perfectly good PC? No sane person for sure. However, I don’t have a perfectly good PC, and then there is the issue of my sanity (mu ha ha ha ha).

So, with the expectation of total meltdown, I started to think about installing Vista Release Candidate 1. I read a few reviews, the most in depth one explained how RC1 is miles ahead of beta1 and beta2, which were horror shows. It made me think of how much better MOLI is now, than when I first sat at this desk. Anyway, in this review I read, the fellow upgraded his EX Prof. to Vista RC1. He was amazed at how smooth it went. Of course there were issues, but in the end he had a fairly usable PC running Vista.

Well, I started to hatch a plan. Frustrated with my video card woes (frame rate is life), I uninstalled, reinstalled, installed old drivers, and alternate (Omega) drivers. Nothing made any difference. Installing Vista should ensure a clean set of drivers. Nvidia did have a beta version of their Vista drivers available, so it was possible… Was it advisable?

I decided to install Vista on my 2nd hard drive. Long story short, it all went well, with a major side note: It didn’t just install on the 2nd hard drive, it moved files and folders around on both drives, moving some program files to a folder called \windows.old and adding things to the C drive as well. Oddly enough, I can still boot into XP and as of yet have no Vista related problems. Maybe it also rewrites XP’s registry to reflect the changes it makes as it installs. Further investigation will tell.

So, what is Vista? Vista is what Microsoft has been developing since just before the release of XP some years ago. Vista is the first windows OS to require a 3D graphics accelerator to function. At first glance, Vista seems to be a significant departure from XP. I found myself floundering for short periods when trying to do simple things like find TCP/IP setting for the NIC card or navigating the file system. Surprising. These changes are supposed to be improvements. The jury is still out.

Vista is very pretty! What does the 3D card do for you? It makes it Mac caliber pretty; maybe even more so. Windows shrink and fade instead of just clicking off. I am sure as the OS matures, there will be tons of MS and home-spun plug-ins to change the 3-D effects. Everything has a shallow shadow on the desk top, and the window frames are transparent. There are lots of shiny animations for file-download and progress bars. One fairly cool feature related to 3-D enables the user to see all running applications three dimensionally cascaded on an angle, so the user can choose the app. He/she wants to switch to and click it into focus. Another Mac-like addition is windows sidebar. You can populate it with shiny gadgets like a clock or CPU/memory use meters, weather, and lots more; all very shiny and pretty.

But, what about my video card test? Well, just as I feared, even with a new OS and a clean set of drivers, it behaved just as poorly in Vista as in XP. Hoorah! It’s trashed. Now, with that confirmation I can start researching the parts that will make-up my next PC. The balance of price vs. power begins. …but that’s for another blog.

So, Windows Vista works. You can get it free at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx,
but it will stop working in May of `07, unless you buy it then. It may be prettier than Mac, but I got the impression that MS was looking to Apple when it created many of the desktop graphics enhancements. That should give you Mac heads something to boast about.