Hoke’s Ramblings

So, a guy comes around to my place today to install ADSL, right? I almost think to myself, “hooray!”, but don’t, because as forseen by myself in a vision, all is not well on Telkom’s end of the line.

The dude tells me he’s a Teljoy contractor and Telkom haven’t done their part of the work. He also tells me that they aren’t allowed into the exchanges, otherwise he could’ve fixed it himself.

The other interesting thing is Telkom policy prohibits phone wires from going through roofs/ceilings, but apparently feeding the cable through trees is ok. ??

More one day…

Ok, so after taking a week to download the ISO using MS’s crappy download manager (because nothing else worked) I sat myself down in front of the PC, foregoing Survivor, to see what this long-awaited beast was actually capable of…

My initial thoughts during installation were, “please, please don’t destroy my other partitions”. Followed by, “this has to be at least twice as good as XP, because it’s taking twice as long to install.”

One thing amazes me above all others. Despite the countless revisions of Windows over the years, after 1) Specifying your locale [English (South Africa)] and 2) specifying your country of residence [South Africa], Windows still can’t hazard a guess as to what your time zone is, so you have to sift through the list all the way from the PST through Helsinki and goodness knows who else is GMT+2 until you find “Harare, Pretoria”.
But I digress. 75 minutes after first sticking the DVD in my drive, I’m in a pretty nifty GUI. It’s a bit daunting how many popups and windows it throws at you off the bat, and seeing these things phase in and out of existence can make you a little dizzy, but things calm down after a while.

My sound card (SB Live!) may or may not have worked from the install. It seems it has for others, and not for still others. I didn’t hear any sounds, so I risked installing the XP drivers. This is an enormous risk, let me tell you. It crashed so badly that even booting into ‘last known good configuration’ didn’t help. I now have a fairly intimate knowledge of Safe Mode. After disabling the sound card things seem a bit more stable.

While scratching around in safe mode I was pleased to see that under disk management it looks like you can now resize partitions…not that I’m crazy enough to attempt this during a beta or even a pre-service pack release, but still, it’s nice to know they’re making the effort.
On the memory front, this thing is a Pig. Before even doing anything it’s already swallowed up all of my RAM (512MB) and my page file is sitting somewhere around 560MB, so things craaaawl.

My main motivation for trying out Vista is the Media Centre. Since 80% of my PC’s uptime is used for watching videos, I wanted to see what all the MCE fuss was about. It seems quite nice, and I imagine the interface is pretty readable on a TV (I didn’t try, because my keyboard’s in the study and the TV’s in the bedroom) but I couldn’t actually play anything, because of my lack of functioning sound card. It seems they’re quite insistent on getting the full multimedia experience.

Most of the other nifty new things in Vista also rely on the sound card, namely Text to Speech and Speech Recognition. I’m curious to see if Microsoft Anna sounds any more pleasant to talk to than Microsoft Bob.

Well, those are my thoughts on Vista. A pretty interface, but not much more. Maybe I’ll have nicer things to say if I get my sound card working (Downloading KX drivers as I type - seems to have worked for some people)