(ThatKidInTheCorner :: The Wow Is NOW, Mother******s!)

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March 24, 2007

The Wow Is NOW, Mother******s!

That's right, I am now running Vista on my home PC -- and I live to tell about it

Against my better judgment and in the face of general skepticism from a number of folks, I went a little loony last night and installed Windows Vista on the new home computer. This had been the plan for a while (and by "a while" I mean since my old computer died and I came up with my "buy a new computer" plan), but I finally got my act together this week (and by "this week" I mean "Friday after work").

The good news is that Vista is now alive and running on my PC. Granted, I just bought this machine and it has healthy specs (dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, nifty graphics card), but still, I'm almost a little surprised. The bad news is that it wasn't exactly easy to get everything up and running. The install itself took a couple hours, but I expected that. I popped in the installation disc before heading out for the night and then was able to fiddle with the finishing touches hours later when I returned home.

(Cue snide comments about how I spend my Friday nights. Go on. Get it out. Yes. I hang out at home and install operating systems. Uh huh. It's a very glamorous life, I know.)

My issues with the installation:

1. The sound didn't work. Yeah, no sound is kind of a biggie. I needed to reinstall a sound driver from Realtek and then adjust the sound settings to make sure the signal was being piped through my fancy digital audio output. The driver thing was semi-tricky, but adjusting the settings was more a hassle than anything else (needed to burrow through some semi-unfamiliar menus to find it). Generally speaking, I was surprised that the digital output wasn't set as a default.

2. Once the sound was working, it had this stupid echo effect. So at first I thought that this was a setting on my receiver (I send the PC sound out to my receiver and get the nifty surround-sound action). I fiddled with that for a while. Then I burrowed into the Realtek settings and discovered that some sort of sound effect called "environment" was being applied to the sound output. I unchecked the box, and everything was cool. Still, I have zero idea why this would have been the default. Whatever.

3. Where are my DVDs? The default settings on Vista didn't recognize the DVDs that I had [clearing throat] backed up on my PC. A quick search got me the data I needed to get that sorted out, and it involved editing the registry. Dude. Standard users should NOT need to edit the freakin registry to find and watch their DVDs. Luckily I'm good like that. Also, I can understand the folks at the Soft tossing a bone to Hollywood to at least make the "stealing their valuable content" operation a few steps short of seamless. That's terribly polite of them.

4. Why won't my DVDs play? This was pretty easy to sort out. Another driver (which actually was right where I had left it on my desktop from my earlier installation of XP MCE). Can't complain too much on that one.

That was pretty much it. Admittedly, I haven't tried to get it to talk to the XBOX yet, but it looks like Foldershare is working, so that's a start. Also, I haven't tried to plug in an MP3 player or anything like that quite yet. So far so good.

As for the looming "so is it really worth it" question, I can attest that the media center stuff is definitely an upgrade and is actually pretty nifty. Check plus for that. And the Aero thingie for switching between programs (START+TAB instead of ALT+TAB) looks kind of cool. But I don't know if I'd be tripping over myself to upgrade unless you had a new computer with the necessary firepower. I'll check back in a few weeks from now if anything changes.

In closing, I shall now show you my wow:

There it was. My wow. Hope you enjoyed it.