Being hit by the ‘Wake up call bug’…

Lately Vista x32 has been acting like the bitch queen from hell on my PC, there is just no reasoning with it at all because it does what it wants regardless of your needs. When the OS (Operating System) works it is a dream to use but when it doesn’t it becomes rather irritating. To the point where I’m actually thinking about the damn thing even though I’m at the dinner table with my girlfriend – in a resteraunt. She’s thinking about future things and I’m thinking about how to get more speed out of the OS…

Over the weekend I decided to reinstall Vista in preparation for Service Pack 1 due later this month. At the same time I decided to dedicate a hard disk to XP and dual boot between the two OS’s, mainly so I could play older games, which don’t like Vista. Upon installing XP, the setup utility would crash after it had pre-loaded some XP bits on to my system, this was rather puzzling. I performed a full chkdsk /f which took a solid 2hrs, much to my annoyance.

Hours later the setup utility was still crashing. All I wanted to do was format the hard disk XP would reside on! So I tried vista’s setup with the same result. Then I remembered that vista, for some unknown reason has lately been seeing my DVD drive as a SCSI device. This doesn’t harm the functionality of the drive inside vista, but it seems the OS setup’s utilities don’t like it. It turns out that there’s a few SATA sockets on my mobo, which are RAID dedicated and Vista does not like this….arse. So I removed the DVD drive SATA cable and shoved it into one occupied by one of my many internal hard drives. Viola! The drive was now recognised as an ATA device and XP installed flawlessly, as did Vista x32. However, I was in for a shock.

XP was the shock. A dated 7yr old OS, which required 134 updates after SP2 was installed. The non-bloated bastard brother of Vista decided to knock me sideways by loading up in around 7 seconds on a WD Raptor 10,000rpm hard disk. By comparison I could return from a visit to the loo and Vista would only just be at it’s login screen firing up. In fact it was so fast that I actually questioned myself as to why I’m using Vista. Sure it looks great, but the whole Aero interface had worn thin after a few months of it’s release and I was coo’ing at the slim XP interface.

So why am I using it? DirectX10 is about as useful as acts in the UK to circumvent street crime. Vista may be smoother and quicker than XP in most areas but lately it’s been feeling heavily bloated, even though I have trimmed the number of active services down as much as possible.

I tried to watch some videos this weekend on Vista via Zoom Player, except it was a stutterfest for some reason. It wasn’t the video, it was wmpnetwk.exe (windows media player network sharing service) using up 70% of my CPU cycles to do something random, whilst Zoom Player chugged along with Danny Glover in Predator 2 sounding like he was underwater. What the hell was it doing? I observed this service over the course of the weekend and came to the conclusion that it’s a greedy bastard using a large amount of CPU time for what? It never did this before. I’m not currently sharing any media given that my Xbox 360 is dead, and I haven’t added any media folders for monitoring yet since I am on a new vista install.

Of course there is more to Vista than that, it’s heavily redesigned and updated to easily cope with future hardware and technology and do agree that it handles that very well. XP fares somewhat worse here, for example setting up XP to stream media to a 360 – a nightmare in itself requiring a heap of updates. Anyway, I’m still questioning the need for Vista right now. XP may be an old aging OS, but on a 4GB 3.7GHz dual core system it really flies

We’re talking Bugatti Veyron vs an F1 Grand Prix car, and you can decide which is which.

More Power!

I’ll possibly be away for a few days while I do a total rebuild on this PC, which is an ancient beastie. To be honest I don’t need to build a new rig, but given that Windows Vista arrives towards the end of January, I do want my machine to handle this bloated behemoth of an Operating System (OS). I’d roughly guess that about 90% of PC users who want this OS will end up doing a rebuild of their machine.

It’s slightly absurd that an OS should require so much resource power just to bloody run, but that’s just typical Microsoft. I’m going to stick to XP for as long as I can though, because I’ll be buggered if I’m paying £220 for the Home Premium Edition, I’ll wait for a price drop. I’m not too clear on the upgrade version yet as the info is a bit clouded. So this Friday 5th, my new PC parts will arrive along with XP Media Center 2005. Hopefully everything should go well, because I’ve got a heap of reviews needing checking.

This new rig will be mainly built for non gaming use, as I have the Xbox 360 for games now. So I’ll be doing video encoding, general office use, blogging/php work, photo editing and multimedia on this new rig for the most part. One half of me doesn’t want to spend the best part of £750 on new parts, given that this machine still does and can easily do anything that I normally throw at it. Hell XP flies on this. However it struggled with the Windows Vista Beta, although it was a beta. See ya soon!

So I’ll be moving from:

Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ (running overclocked at 2.4ghz)
1.5GB of DDR3200 Ram
3x160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hard drives
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
Nvidia 6800GT (running dual 19" Widescreens)
Geforce 2MX PCI (running one 20.1" Widescreen)

To:

Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard (its got blue leds!)
Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4ghz (will be overclocked)
2GB of DDR2 PC6400 Ram (further 1gb to be added later)
1x160GB Hitachi Deskstar (got enough external storage as it is)
Creative Audigy 2 Sound (I’ll stick with this for now)
Gainward Geforce 7900GT (to drive my dual 19" screens)

Last night I underwent what can only be described as a stressful 2hrs. I decided to run a Chkdsk (disk scan) on my PC’s hard disk, something I’d not done in a while. Now things were going well, until Chkdsk reported a colossal problem on the partition that Windows XP itself resides on. Without any intervention, the bugger decided to ‘fix’ the problem itself resulting in my entire windows partition rendered almost completely unusable. Sometimes I wish I actually used ghost to backup my data but I prefer to install stuff the manual way.

I ended up doing one of the fastest XP reinstalls I’ve ever done, and now have most of my apps restored, as well as my hardware devices up and running too. I’m quite lucky I didn’t actually lose any critical data because I keep them on a separate partition. It’s quite disconcerting to see such an important utility like Chkdsk do its scan, with the user not knowing weather his/her system will be usable after it’s finished it’s dirty work. Anyway, my PC is back up and running now. I’ve just got minor applications to install over the next few days.

I tell you, just a few hours without Internet access was quite a frightening prospect for me. Not having access to my email, this blog, MSN, IRC, online banking, online billing as well as the various forums I read on a daily basis left me very empty and somewhat lost. Moral of this story? Back up yer sodding data and avoid blonde bimbo’s!

Anyway, Jake over at http://spikex.net/blog/ has a small but informative preview on Beta build 5308 of Vista. It’s a good read!