Vista Review – So far, so good
Well, I have been using Windows Vista Ultimate for a month now, and so far it has been pretty good, considering that it is a new OS. There have been a few niggles along the way though, and I have managed to BSoD it a number of times.
Media Centre Store Manager
This one really bugs me. When the PC has been running for a few minutes, the Media Centre Store Manager crashes. I have no idea what this is (and I have not looked into what it is), and is annoying in a “I was enjoying the stability until this”.
BSoD
I have traced this to WoW patch downloader. It seems that if I have any USB devices attached, it will BSoD after trying to download after 5 minutes. Pretty repeatable as well.
Drivers
This is my biggest annoyance. The board that I got (Asus P5B Deluxe Wi-Fi) drivers for Vista suck. Really suck. The Wi-Fi driver does not work at all (will not connect to a secured network), and I have had to revert to old XP drivers. Alas, there are no 64 bit drivers available that work, so that beautiful 4 GB of RAM is wasted so far. *sigh*
Thankfully, NVidia *finally* released the RTM drivers the other day. Woot!
Screen Flicker
When I run an application that requires administrative privileges, the screen darkens and shows the UAC authorisation screen. Why does it have to flicker? It is almost as if it is switching form 3D mode to 2D mode. Mind you, this appears to have disappeared since I installed the new NVidia drivers
Apart from that, I now find XP very hard to go back to. The virtualisation support in Vista (and, admittedly, the Core 2 Duo processor), is very very cool.