Faux' blog

Vista!

Yay, Vista arrived, thanks to Microsoft for running the developer "competition", and thanks to Ian Moulster for keeping us posted.

Everything worked fine, even automatically grabbing the drivers for my (unflashed) SI3114 card up off Windows Update, and telling me to install the drivers for my X-fi.

So far, I've only had one major problem: The GUI is slow. Far too slow.

I expect that some of the slowness is actually being caused by Windows itself, but the one-second-plus black screen whilst switching to the secure desktop for UAC sounds incredibly unlikely. I've not worked out what to blame for this yet, but the nvidia drivers and the creative drivers are high up the list of possible candidates.

For reference, I currently have a Windows Experience index of 4.2 (RAM and CPU limited), and have tried disabling Aero and desktop composition, updating graphics drivers, etc.

I find it strange that, despite getting a 5.9 Experience index for "Graphics" (ie. desktop), the Vista required specs, quotes some rather vague definitions for "adequate graphics memory", which makes no suggestions as to what would be recommended for ~4MP (3520x1200). Some event log messages suggest I'm running out at 256MB, which is bad. :/

Other minor things (note that, bar Miranda, Daemon Tools and BOINC I've been sticking to mostly Microsoft apps (yes, even IE7 and Windows Media Player)):

• The "official" OpenSSL binaries use an old version of MSVCR71.dll, which I didn't feel like installing (I'm sure I'll pick it up when I install some crap later), building them is easy: perl Configure --openssldir=c:/openssl VC-WIN32 ms\do_masm nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak test nmake -f ms\ntdll.mak install
• Textpad 4 (I didn't get along with 5) needs to be run as Administrator to add itself to right-click menus.
• You can no-longer set a PNG as your wallpaper?!
• It'd be nice if there was some official support for XVid and Ogg/Vorbis (and maybe some other free (as in, to implement(ish)) standards, the second doesn't even have an unofficial solution for WMP/Vista.
• Aero picks up the artefacts in my tft quite spectacularily, damn.
• And, most importantly, I suck at pre-format backups. :(