In the meantime, I finally bought myself a new PC; primarily geared for gaming and multimedia use. It has been a long time coming; I first thought of buying one around June last year, but postponed that to buy a car - but I finally took the plunge.
So once again, I have a fairly bleeding age machine - some very good components (first time I have actually bought a separate powersupply for example), quad core Phenom II processor (the i7 was way too expensive, and bang for bucks, the Phenom II delivers); and for the first time - windows as my main OS (I am considering installing Linux - but seeing that I want to primarily use this to play games and watch movies etc. not sure of that path yet).
Installing Vista is a pain, installing Vista 64 is a bigger pain. Microsoft definitely has the stupidest OS installation system - I have installed numerous flavours of Linux, Free BSD and even OS X - and nothing comes close to the stupidity and unusability of Vista - seemingly the most advanced OS Microsoft has to offer commercially (there is Windows Server 2008 I suppose in contention). For starters, Vista installation takes an age to actually start up ... but there is no real feedback - no twirling cursor or even product ads - just a blank screen with the cursor. Secondly, modern Linux installations manage to show an installation screen with the highest possible resolution - Microsoft can only show 800x600 even if the default drivers for my graphics card can actually do much migher resolutions. And then there is the bug (IMO at least) that has been caried out since Windows 95 - first it asks you for your location setting, and then it asks you for the timezone ... surely the default timezones should correspond to at least somewhere in the location you have chosen previously?
I have installed every windows consumer operating system, as well as windows 3.x; I have installed Windows 2000 and Windows 2003; and Vista is by far the worst installation of the lot. As for the OS itself - so far it is quite stable and seems to work nicely. Aero is overrated - and I don't really like the new look; but I suppose I will get used to it (or revert to classic). And maybe, if I have some time, I will try to expoeriment in installing OS X Leopard ... I do have the installation disks afterall.
New "study" desk
The glow of cooling fans in the dark
