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My Fun And Exciting Windows Vista-Adventure
Posted by isecore on April 29th, 2008
… or, how I’d rather have my eyes gouged out by scalding irons than use it again.
I deleted my Windows-partition a few weeks ago when I had finished playing through the games I wanted to try out. Recently I felt another hankering for some gaming-action and decided to reinstall Windows. This time though I went for the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, thinking that I should do it properly. Or whatever. Mostly I just wanted to see if there was such a huge difference in Crysis between DX9 and DX10.
Well, anyways. After moving around some drives I popped the disc in the drive and proceeded to install. The installation is fairly straightforward, essentially as dumb as the XP-install but at least it’s prettier to look at. Partitioning is a bit smoother though, although as usual the way of thinking in Windows is somewhat backward.
After some reboots there was some information that needed to be input. Create a user, etc etc. Then, for some inexplicable reason Windows decided it was time to do the Windows Performance Benchmark or whatever it’s called. Stupid, since I was running on stock-drivers and all that. There’s no way of skipping it though, so I just rolled my thumbs and waited.
Until a minute or so later when it bluescreened. Something about the memory controller. I sighed and waited until it rebooted by it’s own volition.
When it started up again I was greeted by the create-a-user request. However, my chosen username was apparently already taken, so I created another. This time it didn’t do the Windows Performance-whatever thing since I guess it had already been checked off somewhere inside the corridors as “done”. A moment later I was looking at the login-screen. On screen were two icons with my first username and then my second one.
Before I continue, let me say now that I hate that login-screen. First off, it looks like it was designed by Mimi from the Drew Carey Show. It’s garish, it’s loud and it takes itself way too seriously. Secondly, whoever thought it would be neat to have an icon to click on and then forcing the user to type the password is stupid. Logging in takes twice as long since you have to flail your arms around your desk as if you were on fire. And as you will find out, I had to look at it a lot, which annoyed me even further.
I felt adventurous and clicked my original username. You know, the one I created first and then followed with a nice ol’ BSOD. I clicked it, punched the password, was greeted with a message as to how Windows was “preparing my desktop” and then for no good reason the computer rebooted. I sarcastically remarked to myself that it was impressive how Microsoft had managed to emulate the look and feel of a BIOS-bootscreen.
Next time around I clicked the secondary username. This time I was not greeted with a reboot, but instead the desktop appeared. Of course, “appeared” isn’t a proper description. Jerked itself onto the screen is probably a more accurate metaphor. It was in glorious 800×600, and everything was the size of Montana. I downloaded and installed drivers for my Audigy2 ZS and 9600GT and then rebooted. Now the login-screen was in a more human resolution.
I logged in and was greeted with the amusing effect that my monitor went into standby. Weird. It made it rather difficult to troubleshoot as well, since I was effectively blind. After a reboot into Ubuntu and some brief googling I found others with the same problem. Apparently Windows or the Nvidia-driver or whichever sometimes got confused as to what port the primary monitor was plugged in. The work-around was to move the monitor to another DVI-port. I tried it, no dice. On a whim I unplugged my TV-out and after a hard reset (ouch!) I could control my own computer again. Apparently Windows though the TV-out was the primary monitor.
Then the fun really began. I installed some basic applications and for every one of them I was hassled with a barrage of “Are you sure you want to do this?”-type questions. I guess some were UAC-related, others were, well, I don’t know why they insisted on popping up for no good reason. Either way they were extremely annoying. It was a little odd as well when I double-clicked a folder and found myself staring at another bluescreen. This time it was the good old “page fault in non-paged area” which was an old buddy of mine. I think every computer I’ve owned for the last 8 years has seen that BSOD happen.
I wasn’t particularly impressed by Aero either. It felt too frail, and after having used Compiz Fusion for almost a year I wasn’t very impressed by any of the effects either. I felt rather constricted by being limited to one desktop; often I would ctrl-alt-left to try to find another desktop, then remember that yeah, Windows still didn’t have that feature. I felt that the whole Vista-experience must be similar to being at a brazilian carnival for mentally retarded people. Everything is dressed in bright, gaudy colors while loud music and sound-effects play, and everyone shouts stupid and obvious questions at you.
“ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DRINK THAT? YES/NO/CANCEL. DO YOU WANT TO OPEN THIS DOOR? ALLOW/CANCEL”
And so forth, and so on.
Moving right along. I started installing Crysis. It took forever. I swear, it went less than a quarter of the speed that the same install took under XP on the exact same machine.
To top it all off, I got another bluescreen. This time it complained about something else, I really didn’t pay attention any longer. Instead I pushed reset and booted into Ubuntu, laughing at myself for the folly of even trying this. Tomorrow I’ll instead install XP strictly for gaming, and never again bother with anything else.
Bill, let me give you some advice. I know you don’t give a rats ass about me, but let me suggest that you and your soul-crushing company just bury Vista already. It’s been more than a year, and the Wow hasn’t started yet. It’s been more like “Why?” than Wow. Just bury Vista, pretend it never happened, pay off whatever people are going to sue you, don’t listen to the fanboys, and simply stick your head in the sand over the whole dang thing. Bill, listen to what an old friend of mine has to say:
(slightly paraphrased)
“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Source.”
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.
April 29th, 2008 at 06:25
I need to inform you that Nvidia suck at making drivers. MS had a report not long ago, showing that nvidias drivers was the most error prone drivers out there (lightyears behind ati and intel) according to crash-reports sent to MS.
April 29th, 2008 at 08:33
Henka,
The main reason that the graphics driver vendors have problem with Vista is that much of the drivers have moved from kernel- to user-space.
The idea was that this would increase the stability of the system as if the graphics crashed the whole system would not go down with it.
Turns out that this introduced another order of complexity when writing the drivers, something the vendors still struggle with.
On a side note, bluescreens are good things. There is no graphical equivalent in Linux, instead the system only freezes when you in windows get some debug information.
April 29th, 2008 at 15:40
I think it’s rather amusing that on a fresh install I got three bluescreens within three hours. What is this, Windows 95?
I also find it rather amusing as to how fanboys say that one should use Windows because “things just work”. In my experience it’s the opposite. Plug something into Ubuntu, it works like expected. Windows, hunt for drivers, try to troubleshoot “magic” bugs, hope something bad doesn’t happen, etc etc.
Of course there’s always going to be issues when relying on other companies drivers, but I cannot avoid laughing at the whole thing. Windows is the easy system to use, everything works automatically? Gimme a goddamn break, that’s just an outrageous lie in my opinion.
Bluescreens are not a good thing. They hardly ever give you anything to work with. They give you some cryptic error-message that you have to decode using Microsofts decoder-ring, and then hope that you can find a solution to it or that it goes away by itself.
The only thing that freezes a Linux-system is a kernel panic, and then it will say flat out why it panicked. It panicked because… the root filesystem couldn’t be mounted, etc etc. In fact, I haven’t seen a kernel panic in almost a decade. Every other time it has appeared to freeze there’s always been a way out of it, either it’s X who’s taken a nosedive (happens with proprietary drivers, since you can’t control them) but that’s solved by a quick ctrl-alt-backspace. If something worse has happened, there’s almost always the Magic SysRQ-button to safely unmount your filesystems to avoid damage and rebooting the system. I say “almost always” since I can’t guarantee that there won’t be some odd situation where it doesn’t work, but since I discovered the Magic SysRQ a few years ago, I have never done a hard-restart on a “locked” Linux-machine, since it’s never been completely locked - just that userspace stopped listening. These things can happen in any machine, but on Linux, 99.9999% of the time the kernel is ticking away in the background anyway.
April 29th, 2008 at 16:21
I just find it amusing that you spent so much time and energy on writing about how much you hate Microsoft instead of how much you like Linux and Mac.
Actually - you seem more like a “hateboy” (as opposed to fanboy) than someone to take seriously IMO.
Note: I’m not saying that you are wrong - you’ve probably forgotten more about computers than I’ve ever learned:-) That is one of the reasons I use Windows - I know that I can get help when I need it. When - not if…
April 29th, 2008 at 16:39
MrArboc: Well, I guess it’s frustration primarily. But I’ve noticed it as well, so I’ll probably focus more on the good karma of writing pro-Linux stuff rather than anti-Windows stuff in the future
April 30th, 2008 at 08:57
To Henka:
The problem with graphic drivers in Vista is for the most part due to the DRM functions implemented to prevent the user from dumping secured content anywhere between the file on the harddrive and the screen. As part of thatM Microsoft moved things out in userspace to reduce the amount of code with kernel priviliges. They also implemented triggers that makes the kernel kill anything remotely suspicious happening in the graphics drivers. All this to prevent anyone being able to dump media playing in an application. When your Vista graphics driver dies its most probably not the driver who died, Vista killed it avtively.
The stability problems are to a 100% Microsofts own work. As usual others gets the blame but i would suggest you read Microsofts documentiation on writing drivers for Vista. If you are a developer its pretty horrid reading.
April 30th, 2008 at 14:42
Hejsan hoppsan snyggo!
Just ja, på engelska är bloggen numera, kan jag öva mig inför min usavistelse.
Helloooo handsome! I’v been doing some stuff on my blog, some woman gave me alot of questions to answer, and after that’s finish I have to send it forward to five other persons! It’s very, very, terrible, my legs are shaking and I did’nt knew what to do!
..then I think about you, and I thought that you can be my only victim. You are not five people, but we can say that you’re more handsome than all the rest! And that’s fair enough. So, look at my blog –> http://aprilsaga.blogspot.com/2008/04/bloggfrgor.html and then decide if you wanna do it or not!
Oh, fuck, I’m good on english!
Puss!
April 30th, 2008 at 16:18
You mean you’re “good at english”?
April 30th, 2008 at 17:56
Isecore: Nooooonononono..
May 11th, 2008 at 20:44
No more MS for me, now it’s all Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux. And I’m really happy, yeay!
Almost no need to install drivers any more, both Ubuntu and OS X just recognize all my thingis (cameras, printers, graphic etc).
May 17th, 2008 at 20:26
I’ve been running Vista that i got with my new budget home computer for about 2 months now and I have NEVER had any problems. I’ve never had to press CTRL + ALT + DEL because Windows messed something up – actually the first time I actually saw what happens when you do that is when i wanted to stop a program that was running in the background (note that Vista did nothing wrong, it was the programs fault that I had to CTRL + ALT + DEL).
Before I bought my current computer I had been running various flavours of GNU/Linux for the past 1 – 2 years. Summary: No half-decent word processor (the non-english dictionaries in OpenOffice is a joke), I can install my printer without having to search forums, type into the terminal or PAY for some sucky Linux drivers – I just plugged it in and it worked right away, just like it did with a Macintosh, and which it didn’t do at all with Linux.
Other problems I’ve had: Sound goes crazy when i turn the volume up in VLC, Firefox just shuts down with no error message, X won’t start after system update (PCLinuxOS), Flash is slow, always some problem or another dealing with NTFS drives, No bittorrent client that’s even close to as good as several Windows-based. When I wanted to rip an audio CD in Windows I could very easily do that in Windows Media Player, even be able to choose MP3 format and which bit rate i wanted and having no problems copying the ripped files to an mp3 player – In linux I would’ve to fiddle with MP3 support.
My experience with Vista vs Linux is the opposite of yours – For me Vista just works, and Linux doesn’t.