Tuesday, March 27, 2007

A decade ago...

Ten years? Has it been that long? :)

10 years ago in December, when the Titanic sank, I was formally introduced to my wife.

At that time, little did I knew that she will turn out to be the most important person in my life. She didn't have a good first impression of me that time. She found me an obnoxious, temperamental and cold person I think. I guess I was at that time. LOL.

Nope. Contrary to popular beliefs, we did not watch the romantic Titanic together. She was with someone else and so was I. It's just kinda funny how we got together eventually... months later.

Anyway, that's another story.

Maybe one day we'll have a chance to watch Titanic again... together this time.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Windows Vista sux... for me.

Crappy Microsoft.

Guess it needs some getting used to. Or just given up on.

I fondly remember upgrading to XP a few years back. Almost everything works. My printer, scanner, web cam, and most of the software I had. I do miss Southpark Rally which kinda rawks back on Win 98. :)

And my server had a seamless upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP as well. No problems whatsoever.

I remembered being in awe of the new operating system from Redmond... Windows XP... How stable it was even in a gold release. SP1 was good and SP2 made it better. A merge of user friendliness from 98 and the stability of Windows 2000. It was... a real Wow.

So XP became my primary OS for all my machines. And along the way I've picked up Linux (Mandriva, Fedora, SUSE etc) for casual exploration and decided I'm just not 1337 enough for the *nix stuffs. And I even did a partial switch to Mac OS X. I have a final generation 14" iBook and a Core Solo Mac mini for my "life apps" needs. I love my Macs, but... it's just not an everyday machine for me. I'm not sure how to explain that, perhaps all along I've been pretty much a DOS based person since MS-DOS 2.11 in 1984 on my IBM PC XT. I was 7 years old then.

Moving along since then with Windows 3.1, the revolutionary Windows 95, the improved Windows 98, the Not-so-friendly-but-rock-stable Windows 2000 and finally to the wonderful Windows XP.


I still amaze my colleagues and friends with simple DOS batch commands. :)

And along comes Vista. I had my first hand experience on an evaluation of the final retail Windows Vista Ultimate.

I think I scribbled my journal somewhere, lemme look it up... There it is!

Day 1 - Cloned my XP. Installed Vista. Nice GUI. Aero effect. Hmmz... Need to search for the right beta drivers. ATI and Creative. Webcam doesn't work. Sound is horrible. Where's my 7.1?

Day 2 - Nero is not compatible. VLC doesn't work. Every time I want to watch something I have to switch to another mode which turns off aero. Very distracting. Graphics feels a bit sluggish due to erm.. beta drivers? Firefox crashed with random problems. AVG doesn't work right. Keep disappearing from tray. God, not iTunes too...

Day 3 - Maple Story doesn't work. Haha. More old freeware programs doesn't work. My trusty encoders and portable applications are now legacy programs? Development has stopped for some of them. What are my choices? Crap. Why does media player always lags and opens in the stupid library tab I never use? Nvm that, fixed with a startup switch. Something's wrong with my Warcraft 3. Everything looks funny.

Day 4 - Bought a Sandisk Cruzer U3 Titanium 4gb flash drive. Doesn't work.

Day 5 - Cloned my XP back. Shredded the Vista evaluation disc.

I'm not sure what the future holds, but it will be interesting. Perhaps we can give young Vista a chance and see if he'll grow up with SP1 or SP2.

Just today, a client of mine has bought 2 machines from HP for his business. A media center PC and a Compaq Presario. Both comes with Vista and he's desperately trying to find some way to downgrade back to XP to work with AutoCAD. HP's hotline wouldn't help and HP's website doesn't even provide XP drivers so that he can install a retail copy. Too bad. Perhaps he should have done his research first? But as far as I know, other brands are practicing the same thing.

"Take the beautiful Vista and use it. Resistance is futile. XP is not an option. Legacy will not be tolerated. Offenders will be forced to use only Hotmail. All your base are belong to us. The wow starts now. Welcome to the social..."

Unfortunately, Vista is here to stay. Evolution? *shrug*

Ah well. I was glad that an effort was made for each of the new OS to maintain compatibility with the predecessor. I'm not sure what they did for Vista but I don't like it one bit. It may look nice and everything with the bells and whistles and what-nots and flip flops. End of the day, I just need something that works. And hopefully work better.

Why is Vista released now? There's obviously a lot to be done to it still.

Hasta la vista, Vista. I guess for me the wow ends now.