Tag Archive for 'windows'

Windows UI Taskforce

Published
by
John Griffin
on June 2, 2008
in Tech
. 1 Comment

It’s a huge undertaking but the Windows UI Taskforce are trying to detail every single UI bug in Vista. Just looking through the list serves as a reminder to how half arsed and rushed out the OS was.

The fact that there are still Windows 3.1 style widgets in Windows Vista is unforgivable, it’s the kind of thing that makes it feel cheap and mashed together when using it.

Buggy Nvidia Vista Drivers Revealed

Published
by
John Griffin
on March 27, 2008
in Gaming and Tech
. 1 Comment

The Vista-capable lawsuit is finally yielding some facts about Nvidia’s record of horrendous driver support for Microsoft’s latest OS. This is of particular interest to me as last year I switched over to ATI after many months of problems with my Nvidia card under Vista (which worked flawlessly in XP). This caused me a lot of wasted time and my wallet was significantly lighter by the end of it. According to the newly released documents they were responsible for 479,000 crashes making up 29% of the total logged!

17.9% are Microsoft’s fault, those are the crashes that made me switch back to XP even after shelling out for the OS and new hardware for it.

Tis The Season To Fix The Family PC

Published
by
John Griffin
on December 23, 2007
in Tech
. 0 Comments

If like me you get home for Christmas and are suddenly bombarded by every family member asking you to fix/cleanup their PCs then Appupdater can make your life slightly easier. It basically brings the package management you see from Debian and RPM based Linux distros to Windows, allowing a quick and easy way to update a ton of apps all at once. Lifehacker posted an excellent quide which i recommend to anyone who wants to get their system cleanups done as quickly and easily as possible.

Nvidia GeForce 7900GT in Windows Vista is Joke

Published
by
John Griffin
on May 15, 2007
in Gaming, Life and Tech
. 0 Comments

This message has been the bane of existance for many Windows Vista users who use the Nvidia GeForce 7900GT as their graphics card.

Nvidia 7900 GT

And usually before getting this message we are greeted to a nice screen of scrambled diagonal lines! Interestingly enough it seems to be only effecting those of who use AMD processors. There are a ton of threads all over the Nvidia forums and various other forums all discussing the exact same problem.

I’ve had enough of Nvidia. Which is why a brand spanking new ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT just arrived on my doorstep. I look forward to installing it tonight.

Radio Interview Airs Tuesday

Published
by
John Griffin
on January 29, 2007
in Life and Tech
. 2 Comments

Just finished my interview with Iain Mackenzie of Radio 1. Should air in some of the news segments tomorrow (Tuesday), it’s all about Vista - good and bad.

My First 10 Days With Windows Vista

Published
by
John Griffin
on January 18, 2007
in Gaming, Life and Tech
. 8 Comments

Having obtained an OEM version of Vista a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and move my main computer over to Microsoft’s much hyped new OS. Choosing to install the 32 bit version over the 64 bit one seemed like a wise move even with my modern processor due to the driver issues usually involved with the latter. Sure enough, after a smooth installation process, which is vastly improved over XP, I didn’t need to install a single driver to have a usable system.

So far so good. Booting in for the first time was cool, I quite like the effects such as the blurred glass and the window transitions. It gives Windows a much slicker feel then before even if purely aesthetic and of no functional use. After a playing about with this for a while and tweaking the system a little it suddenly hit me, where are the new features? I can see a sidebar, nice, now I don’t need to install the Google one, I can see indexed search, nice, now I don’t need Google desktop and I can see Giant Windows Defender, uhoh, better install AVG.

Vista

Having the Ultimate edition does entitle me to a bit of Media Center action. It hooks up well to the 360 allowing me to access all my masses and masses of Media Center recordings and the many WMV files I have stored right in the living room. Yeh so that’s not much use with the current crop of codec support. I am a strong advocate of MPEG-4 (especially AVC aka x264) and when it won’t even allow native playback of Xvid files it’s not much use to me. The fact that all they need to do is switch on direct show codecs to get it to work added to the fact the the 360 can natively decode x264 in software (!) makes it a bit of a joke.

Games support in Vista is a bit hit and miss. I played through the latest Sam and Max episode without a hitch but when trying to install Jaws Unleashed (I kid you not) I didn’t have much luck. Supreme Commander is looking like the next big thing to hit the PC so I will be nailing that in the next few weeks for sure. The real seller on Vista for me is Live Anywhere which won’t hit till summer making it perfectly ok to hold off upgrading. Getting achievement points for PC games is definitely appealing to me.

Third party application support much like the games is a mixed bag and I will write a separate post on this entirely to see if I can drum up some help.

Overall I am impressed with the OS if a little let down by the number of new features available right now. It’s certainly not a revolution but it provides some much needed polish to an OS that has been on the shelves far too long without an update. Once the Ultimate Extras and Live Anywhere hit I am quite positive that Vista will start to come into its own.