www.lewiz.org

Attempt two at running Windows Vista on the desktop and here’s how I’ve found things:

• With my Audigy 2 ZS sound card now working (I had to force Windows to search c:\windows for drivers!) life is much easier.


• Per-application volume controls (done at the mixer-level, not the application level ala some GNOME apps) is a really handy thing.


• Windows Media Player did an awesome job with my DVD.  Specifically: I was half-way through watching Lily when my Lost download finished.  I fired up Lost and once it finished there was a really handy option to resume my DVD playback from where I left off.


• The default font (at least the default font in Firefox and Pidgin) is really great… it looks good, but is also very easy on the eyes.  I like the Bitstream fonts used in Ubuntu, but this is far better.


• The ClearType sub-pixel font rendering is not what I’m used to.  It’s a lot better than in XP, but I’m not convinced it’s as good as we have in GNOME.


• Due to an issue with my graphics card, I’ve disabled the fancy Aero 3D desktop.  With the non-fancy one I can’t figure out how to change the colours of titlebars, the Start bar, etc.  I find the difference in blue between active and inactive window too subtle.


• Firefox feels a lot quicker (than under Linux/GNOME), as do a few other operations and actions.


• There is no ‘telnet’ command by default.  This is a mistake, it clearly wasn’t taking up much space, and it’s incredibly useful to have around.


• Pidgin installs quickly and easily, providing a superior replacement to the Windows Live Messenger.  There is some graphics corruption from time to due to, I presume, a GTK+ issue.


• I can run Lightroom, Photoshop and a whole host of other applications without using virtualisation software.  This is the real reason I’m interested in a non-Linux/Solaris desktop.


• Playback of non-region 2 DVDs is a bit of an issue.  I think I only have a few more goes at switching the hardware region before it gets locked.  Under Linux all of my DVDs play without issue.

All in all I’m coping.  There doesn’t seem to be too much that I used to be able to do that I can’t do now.  I’ll see how things work out…

Tags: Computing

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.