Windows revisited

Dec 21

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I’ve recently had an enquiry about something on Windows Vista.  A day or two later I realised I do have a machine with a Vista partition, so I booted into it to investigate.

First impression: my god, this takes forever to boot, and then to do anything!  I guess that’s why ‘they’ say the Atom processor is underpowered.  Firing up MSIE to go and download the things I was to investigate also took a very long time.

Second impression: wow, this takes me back!  On Ubuntu a year ago I had to download a graphics driver capable of driving the Sun monitor.  This time it was only the smaller monitor that every modern driver should be fine with, but I got a different problem.  Vista’s driver was fine with the 1280×1024 screen size, but the whole screen image was offset from the physical screen, leaving a black band bottom+right of the monitor, and the top left of the display off the screen.  That’s something I haven’t seen on a desktop OS[1] for many years!

Anyway, I was able to answer the enquiry.  Enough Windows for one year, I think.

[1] The nearest I can think of in recent years is when connecting an OHP to the laptop for a conference talk.  I had serious problems with that as recently as 2005, and moderate problems comparable to the above still happen from time to time.

Posted on December 21, 2010, in windows. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

  1. vet | December 21, 2010 at 9:18 pm

    I struggled with Vista for three long years. It really does suck the big dog’s one.

    Now I’ve been upgraded to Windows 7 on the work machine, which is better, largely I suspect because the hardware is also massively upgraded. But I still have Vista on the work laptop that now lives permanently at home, and my gods is it slow.

    Particularly, for some reason, when running Internet Explorer. Since I’m currently responsible for website design and maintenance for my employer, I have a good set of browsers installed – Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari – and all – every single one of them – loads my pages and runs the attached scripts so quickly that you can’t see anything updating, except the things you’re supposed to see. But not IE. If you load the page with IE, you can actually see the whole content of the page before the script gets around to hiding most of it.

    It’s beyond pathetic.

    Merry Humbug to you, by the way.

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