I sat down Friday afternoon to unwind and play a little Supreme Command. Instead of being able to play, some program that came on my machine with the original load started working away. Of course this action was without my permission. It created a very choppy effect and the mouse would barely work. Shifting from the game to windows I found that in addition to the McAfee Virus Scanner kicking in another two applications were accessing the hard drive. Not something one wants to occur when you have a laptop hard drive. With all this I decided it was time to just get rid of this factory load and get a fresh load of Windows Vista on this machine. At least then I would know if it actually performed or not on this particular machine.
After a 35 minute troubleshooting session with Dell Tech Support to find out that the default AHCI setting for the hard drive needed to be changed to ATA or Vista would blue screen, I got it loaded. This was of course after about 3 hours of me troubleshooting the blasted machine. I really love scenarios like that were there is no logical or reasonable way to troubleshoot something because there is no access to any log or exception (the blue screen literally would flash with no way to pause it). But now that I have the machine loaded I’ve been cruising along at a good pace loading software and working on some things. I got Visual Studio 2008 reloaded on my primary host machine, which will be nice since that is where all of my new development will be taking place. Hopefully I’ll get all my standard settings and software loaded by the end of this coming week; it really sucks to have a machine that is limping along.
On another note, I seriously wonder what Microsoft intends to do about Vista. I’m sure eventually people will start moving to it, but most are getting burned pretty badly. I’m sure it has started to cause a trickling, if not an outright flow, of PC users to Mac. I can’t blame any of them; I’m seriously back at wondering if I shouldn’t go buy a Mac to work on my afterhours work. Simply put, Vista is not ready for prime time, and after closer inspection and understanding of the situation, neither is today’s hardware. We need 64 bit across the board with 4-8 GB of RAM for Vista to really be impressive. We’ll get there, but it isn’t going to happen tomorrow. I’d be surprised if we get there by end of 2008.
In addition to getting Visual Studio 2008 loaded back on my machine, I also loaded Office Ultimate 2007. Since Word 2007 has blog posting features I’m going to give it a try over Windows Live Writer to see how it is different or better (or worse). This entry will be my first posting with it.
So the weekend is pretty much over, it ended up being a general maintenance weekend instead of build new apps and writes more code weekend. That is a problem, but sometimes, one has to start on a fresh canvas to get the art created.
