Vista - The Installation, Part 1

I mentioned a few posts back that I had trouble with my Vista order, from Aria. However, I also mentioned that they've since sent me my copy of Vista Ultimate 64-bit OEM, along with some hardware.

Tonight, I finally decided to go balls out (hmmmm) and install it. But, although I had originally planned to have it dual-booting alongside XP Pro SP2, I opted to format my XP partition and put Vista on it instead.

I wont bore you with many details, though everything went ever-so-smoothly. Almost too smoothly for my liking. I'm sitting here typing this on Vista Ultimate, within Firefox. The only problem I've encountered whilst installing the various pieces of software, is that Adobe Reader 8 dislikes me mapping My Documents to my fileserver. The installer throws up an error and craps out on me. Apart from that, all other programs are up and running just as well as XP - if not better.

I don't see the need to splash out for an upgrade or even the retail copy of Vista Ultimate, as I'd have to sell a leg or two, and the OEM version is just as good. Many people have reported that Microsoft are very friendly over the phone when re-activating it too. There's also a story floating about that a Microsoft Customer Service person told a customer to use a Vista crack to re-activate his legal copy. Odd.

Over the next few days I hope to try out a few games, along with a couple of benchmarks to compare this Vista install to my previous XP one.

I'll also report back with any findings, but so far the 64-bit of Vista Ultimate hasn't caused me any problems/headaches/pains, just a nice easy Windows experience - contrary to many Anti-Microsoft-Fan-Boi's reviews.

Before I go, I'll leave you with this screenshot. I have my original wallpaper still, using the Red colour tint on the GUI - running Aero of course. Notice the handy little file-transfer speed on the dialogue box:

Vista

comments Posted: Tuesday 27th February 2007, 05:18pm
Categories: Articles, Computers and Technology
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Summary

I could write 5 or so long posts about the events over the past week or so, but I'll keep it short and sweet, in the form of a summary, or Précis for nostalgia purposes...

Update: Forgot to mention, both Aria.co.uk and mini-itx.com have since sent me both orders that were outstanding/RMA'd. It appears that they both ignore many emails, but do pay attention to a letter through the post - so the good ol' postal system still has a use over e-mail.

comments Posted: Monday 26th February 2007, 05:18pm
Categories: General
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Quick Poll/Vote

I'm needing some feedback for slickhouse, mainly to direct my [limited] development time this year.

2007 is a busy year after all for me, as I'm off to Tunisia next week; flying out to Botswana in July; starting my C&G 7407 Stage 2 Certificate in FE Teaching; I aim to teach myself PHP properly and I'll make my first million too.

In amongst all that and my job/spare time, I aim to completely re-design slickhouse.com - once and for all. I've been planning a re-design pretty much since last January when Version 5 went live, and have narrowed my choices down to two options:

1) Use WordPress as my Content Management System (CMS), integrating my existing blog content into the website as a whole. The only hard-work involved would be to build a WordPress theme from scratch.

2) Build my own CMS from scratch, using PHP/XHTML/CSS. This will hopefully be able to use the existing blog content, but I'm not 100% certain at this point in time. It'll involve much more development time, but hopefully the resulting CMS can be used on other projects and made Open Source for others to use.

Either way, I'll be using my Ubuntu webserver (if the parts ever arrive) for development, before I make the whole thing live. Let me know what you think...

comments Posted: Tuesday 13th February 2007, 05:18pm
Categories: Slickhouse
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Links

Today I've added a 9th category to my blog - Links!

I'll go through a few of the archived posts and add the category to them, or switch the category completely - but from now on, all minor posts containing links will be posted in the Link category and, if necessary, added to the Links section of the sidebar. Simple really.

comments Posted: Tuesday 13th February 2007, 05:18pm
Categories: Links, Slickhouse
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Mini-Scalextric

I stumbled across this scalextric wannabee, that's actually pretty cool.

LordByron will remember the championship we had on Saturday evening, the videos from which I hope to put up sometime this week.

That is all.

comments Posted: Monday 12th February 2007, 05:18pm
Categories: Links
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