Victory Soap v. 2.0

My laptop went south earlier this month, and a trip to Wally World revealed the selection was Vista, Vista and more Vista. I could have ordered one somewhere, but I wanted one immediately if not before.

So, I bit the bullet. Probably my main complaint with Vista is it's overweening security settings - for instance, to install programs, you must have administrator privileges. Most of the time, the 'puter just stops and a popup window appears that allows said privileges. In order to immunize in SpyBot Search and Destroy, the program must be run with administrator privileges. Right click on the shortcut icon, and that appears as an option, and then you can proceed. Installing extensions in Firefox can be a pain for the same reason with the same solution.

This thing has 2 gigs of DDR2 memory, and honestly, it could use a bit more. At the moment, Vista doesn't recognize 4 gigs, and since it has two I gig chunks, and the next size up is 2 gig, and they have to be paired - well, I'll wait until there is a patch before I upgrade the memory.

Vista also needs a hell of a graphics processor - what would have had the gamers salivating a few cycles ago is what this OS needs just to see it.

Fuck games, and fuck operating systems that don't recognize a large amount of RAM, which is what I want at the very least. Maybe not 4 gigs... But Dell does offer laptops with XP. (I know, Dell...) Or I could just go by the local used laptop store and take my chances with another used one... Or buy a desktop. But I've grown to prefer the portability.

Blah blah blah.

Welp, back in Win98SE days, I felt the same about XP. I'm thinking Vista is to XP what Millenium was to 98SE.

Remember rebooting several times a day, just because?

I figured I'd try this Vista thing out for a while and if it was intolerable, XP would replace it in a heartbeat. So far, not that intolerable.

Andrea: A local computer repair shop might be able to just replace the fan in your laptop for a small fee. I'd look into that first, if you're otherwise happy with the computer.

Jeffro: Naw, Vista doesn't need spiffy graphics hardware. You need that only to get the shiny "Aero" look. But that's optional. (And the UAC authentication stuff can be turned off if you don't like it and Know What You're Doing.)

Also, Vista can use 4GB of ram just as well as XP or anything else.

(You might see 3.2-3.4 gigs on a 4GB system, but that's if you're running a 32-bit OS, the maximum address size is 4GB, and the hardware needs some of that space for memory-mapping, for your video card and hard disks. This is the fault of the PC hardware, not Vista, and XP does the same thing.)