Dawn Xiana Moon: Melodic folk pop infused with passion and honesty. From Chicago.

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Another Reason to Hate Windows Vista

In an acronym: WGA. My laptop came directly from Dell with the OS pre-installed, and it's validated itself as "Genuine Windows Vista" before. But one day--probably after updating, or failing to update itself--it decided that it couldn't validate itself anymore. So depending on how annoying the OS decides to be, it gives me pop ups every few minutes to every few hours telling me that I "might be a victim of software counterfeiting" and to please click on the link provided to validate my copy of Vista. Sure enough, I click on the link, download and run their validator, and it tells me that I do have a real, genuine, 100% loved-by-Microsoft copy of their product. But does my machine seem to agree? Nope. The bottom right of my screen has a little note that won't go away, the the software counterfeiting notice keeps popping up. Sigh. At least I haven't hit the reduced functionality that other users have complained about.

At least it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one that's had this problem. I heard a rumor that Dell was allowing customers to go back to XP--I don't know if it's true, but if it is, I'm switching. Apparently Vista's now "more than two times slower than the most current builds of its
older sibling."

Labels: computers, Windows Vista

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Friday, August 10, 2007

A Cool Feature in Vista

Now that I've ranted about what's annoying in Windows Vista, here's a new discovery that's actually pretty cool: the Windows Sidebar and assorted gadgets. It's well-known that I'm a fan of Firefox, primarily because of its customizability. Vista offers its own version of something that I believe Macs have offered for years--the ability to install useful little programs onto their own sidebar, which stays on the desktop (click on the link for a photo--it does look rather Mac-like, doesn't it). Sometimes the gadgets are just an easier way to access other programs, sometimes they're links to websites (I have one-click access to finding synonyms for any word that I type, for example), sometimes they're tools in their own right. Currently my sidebar shows an alarm clock, a hibernate button, a calculator, the thesaurus, weather, and a wi-fi hotspot finder.

Labels: computers, Windows Vista

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Saturday, August 04, 2007

Annoyance and Windows Vista

Warning: I'm going to geek out for a few moments. At long last, I now have a laptop, and while I love finally having one, the last month has also given me a few headaches with Windows Vista. My top irritations:

1. Windows Update. Don't you hate it when your computer has a mind of its own? I've customized Windows Update so that, in theory, it will only reboot the computer to "finish installing updates" when I tell it to. Unfortunately, that's not the case in reality--as I discovered after multiple attempts to download a large file, attempts that resulted in a only acquiring a small percentage of the file after Windows decided to reboot my computer (and since it's having trouble installing the updates, it ended up restarting every 10 minutes to 4 hours, depending on whether I was around to catch the pop up window in time to tell it to shut up for a few hours). After doing some searching on the problem (which popped up this amusing invoice to Bill Gates for £1,200), I ended up editing my registry, as there's apparently no other way to make the program stop randomly rebooting the computer. Thus far Windows Update looks like it's back under control. Finally.

2. Not only do you need log into your account and make yourself the administrator of your computer in order to do certain tasks, like install most software and edit hidden folders, but you also need to declare yourself the owner over every file in every drive. This is a fairly automated, but time consuming process.

3. Windows Explorer (you know, the piece of the OS that lets you open files and folders on your computer) crashed a lot when I first got the laptop. (Fortunately, one of the updates seems to have remedied the bug.)

4. I'm running a dual-core processor on this computer, but about 50% of the time it still takes a while to open up the Control Panel.

5. When you close a program that's stopped functioning, you'll get a little window that says, "Checking for a solution to the problem." Don't check for a solution (it has yet to find one), just close the program and don't waste my time.

6. If you double click the top of the Task Manager screen, all of the tabs and menus disappear, leaving no apparent way to close the program (it doesn't list itself as a running application, and closing it from the Taskbar doesn't work--the only way to close the utility without the menu is to restart). This can be rather confusing, particularly if you don't realize how the tabs and menus disappeared, or whether they were even there in the first place given that this is an unfamiliar OS. Double click again and everything appears returns to normal, but I don't like this "feature."

7. For some inexplicable reason, Firefox crashes. Often. I never had such problems with the program on XP. That said, I'm still not willing to use Internet Explorer--what would I do without my extensions?

And a funny bit: I know, built-in troubleshooters aren't usually terribly helpful, but Windows Help and Support is amusing. One of the "solutions" reads, "If an error has occurred, it will be displayed with an error code that you can use to search online for help." Translation: "We have no idea what's wrong, but maybe Google does. Because thousands of other users are probably having the same issues with our buggy software."

Labels: computers, Firefox, Google, Windows Vista

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