Some of the biggest news in the computer world recently was the release of windows Vista.  Likely you have heard the myriad stories out there about how vista will chew through your system resources, annoy the piss out of you, and generally provide nothing of worth for the cost and trouble of upgrading.  I am here to say that the stories are only partly true … at least for me anyway.

First off, why did I upgrade to vista?  A mere week before actually getting vista I had been telling friends and family how I wanted to skip vista all together and get a new mac machine.  What made me change my mind?  Well, ultimately it was Vanguard.  I wanted to play vanguard, but to really enjoy that game I knew I needed some beefier hardware.  I purchased a new video card ( Radeon X1950 512MB VRAM ) and got everything ready for the day when I would buy the game.

Well, that day came and after installing vanguard I was prompted to install an updated version of directX.  Normally this wouldnt be a problem, however, I couldnt do it.  Every time I ran the installer it would fail with a vaguely worded “Visual C++ Runtime Error.”  The reason the installer was failing was not because I had a bad disc or anything so mundane, it was because I had hosed my version of windows installer following some instructions to modify XP media center so that I could share media center with my xbox 360.  The kicker is this, the instructions I followed, and programs I ran in an attempt to set this up were all official microsoft instructions.  I dont fully recall what all the steps were, however, they involved uninstalling the 1.1 version of the .NET framework, running a cleaner utility, and reinstalling.  Sounds easy.  The first two steps were, however, upon reinstalling I noticed that I not got runtime errors for every windows installer program I tried to run.  I tried to fix it and nothing worked … even official microsoft advice.  Sounds like it would be time for an XP reinstall, right?  Thats correct … if I had an XP install disk.  You see, I used to have a non-legit windows install.  Then one day MS wised up and released their genuine advantage software that could detect that my copy was not legit and it barred me from downloading updates.  At the time this happened, I worked for a company with an MSDN subscription.  So, from their site I downloaded a legit copy of windows, as I didnt want to be developing software for them with a busted copy of windows.  The problem with this is that I failed to back up and keep my install DVD.  So I had a legit install without media to reinstall.

So, with a busted XP install and a new copy of vanguard waiting to be played, I had had enough.  I decided to bite the bullet and buy a legit copy of windows.  Not wanting to pay $99 for an old ass version of XP, I went for the full on Vista home professional upgrade, to the tune of $170.  Ouch.  Still, it would be nice to stop bothering with trying to find cracks and work around for my OS software on my PC.  I did the install and while most things seemed alright, not ALL was well.

I had no sound.  This is the main problem with ANYONE out there who wants to upgrade to Vista.  Microsoft has removed ALL HAL support for sound cards from direct X in vista.  Thats right, no HAL ( Hardware Abstraction Layer ) support for sound cards anymore.  This has benefits that I wont get into here, but suffice it to say that its not ALL bad.  However, it does mean that you WILL need vista drivers for your sound card.  If, like me, you have an 8 year old sound blaster live card, there simply are no drivers for it.  Whats worse is that not all sound card functionality works under vista because hardware companies had come to rely on directX to drive these effects.  I solved this problem by buying a new $30 sound blaster audigy SE card, the cheapest I could find.  I wouldnt have minded getting a beefier card, but I didnt want to pay $100 for extra features listed on the box that might not even work in vista.  So, to all my friends reading this … if you value the audio functionality of your current PC and you are considering an XP upgrade, DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST.  The sound driver situation is getting better through the use of openAL to replace the hole that directX left, however, its not 100% yet.  Make sure that your sound editing/recording software works not only with vista, but with the sound hardware you have before upgrading (Jason, I am looking at you ).

Other than that, vista has been really nice to me.  I dont notice any slowness due to it eating up resources, nor do I have trouble running many apps at once.  A lot of the bad press aimed at it was either unfounded, or was fixed right away by MS.  I am actually enjoying vista, to be honest.  It IS prettier than XP, and to the nerd in me it is fun exploring this new OS.  Once Windows Live for Games drops on May 8th, I will be much happier that I upgraded.

That being said, would I recommend upgrading to vista?  Not really.  Its not that there are glaring issues with vista that will keep you from doing what you want with it, the problem is that there is simply no reason to upgrade to vista.  It is pretty, but it has no redeeming qualities that make it worth the hefty price tag.  If you are a serious gamer, you WILL eventually upgrade as directX 10 games start coming out, as directX 10 is vista only, however, I dont see this happening all that soon.  You will also need vista if you want to take advantage of the windows for games live service, but there are only a select few people out there who will really want that at first.  Other than that, the rest is cosmetic.  It looks pretty, but it doesnt look as pretty as OSX.  You just dont need vista for anything, plus the hardware support is only now catching up.  I dont know who the market was for MS when they thought that vista would WOW us all, but it is not me.

I guess my main point in this rant is that vista is not worth the money to upgrade.  However, if you have to upgrade for some reason, or you just want to explore the latest OS offering from Microsoft, then vista probably wont be the horrible beast people make it out to be.

Oh!  One last thing.  The UAC ( User Access Control ) system in vista is the most horribly designed pseudo-security piece of bullshit I have ever seen.  What it amounts to is that windows doesnt allow anything access to areas of your disks, and it doesnt allow programs to run without your permission.  From a user interface standpoint it means that for everything you try to run you have two or three dialogs popping up asking for your permission to do mundane things like run a game, or launch a web browser.  While you can tune UAC off, it warns you that you are increasing your risk by doing so.  I think it proves one of two things:

1.  MS does not actually run the code they test to see if it is feasible from a usability standpoint.

2.  MS simply doesnt CARE that it makes the OS incredibly annoying to use, so long as it allows them to claim that it is more “secure.”  You know, it would be a lot safer if all cars were limited to a 10mph speed limit.  However, who would want to drive one?

Having not posted in a while, I thought I would just come up with something to write in here to not let this prime piece of interweb go completely to waste.

Lately … I have been busy.  School is in full swing, and work is really picking up.  Also, every Sunday in March, Heather and I are going to Lamaze classes to learn ancient ninja breathing technique to make delivering a baby a more reasonable ordeal.  So far it has been interesting to learn about the whole process.  Honestly, I didn’t know much about how the insides of a woman worked during pregnancy.  Well, I know now.  I wont go into any gross details, but I will say rats off to ya women.  You do some amazing stuff with your body and it makes me feel completely useless as a man during this whole process.

I cant believe that there are only two months left to go until our baby is here.  Whats more, in that two months I will have completed school and graduated, this work spiral will be winding down, and we will have moved out of our apartment and into a house ( rented ).  How can all of that happen in two months?  I have no clue, but like it or not, I am about to find out.

Aside from real life stuff, I kind of slowed down on my gaming as of late.  I have been sinking myself into the new WoW expansion, having convinced some friends to come back and give the game a try.  I also have given the new MMO Vanguard: saga of heroes a shot.  So far, vanguard is an amazing … but unfinished game.  Sigil ( the company who made the game ) has been very honest with everyone that they HAD to release the game now or never because the money simply dried up.  Being a software developer, I can understand that.  However, right now it means that we are paying to play a game that is full of bugs and incomplete content.  Well, I shouldnt say FULL of it because the game is far from unplayable.  In fact it is a tremendous amount of fun.  If you read up on vanguard youll likely hear people talk about how huge the virtual world is.  Its true.  I am having a blast just exploring the lands and leveling as much as I can stand to without forcing myself to grind.

There is a story behind what I went through to be able to run Vanguard, but I will save it for its own blog post.  Lets just say that it culminated in me upgrading my PC to vista … yeah.  Vanguard IS a total resource hog and requires a beefy machine to run it with many of the graphical options turned on.  However, I am finding that it runs great on both my PC and my laptop at lower settings.  Yeah, it chugs in places, but overall I am surprised at how well it does run, given the stories I heard before buying it.

My biggest complaint about vanguard is not that the game is buggy or incomplete, or that it has fairly steep hardware requirements.  Sigil has been making concerted efforts to fix all of this and it is showing.  No, my main problem is that you have this incredible looking landscape, and the character models for most human looking guys are pretty lame.  The armor, swords, and other accoutrements in the game look great, but the actual character models look bad to me.  Some of them are alright, but most of them just look odd compared with the beautiful trees, buildings, and other things around them.  Further diving into this, I think that the hair is the main problem with the models.  For males I have a choice between short hair that looks alright, a bit longer hair that looks a bit more stupid, short hair with a Elvis-like doo-wop wave along the front that looks dumb, and long hair that makes me look completely 100% gay.  Other races from different continents in the game DO have different hair models, but they all look meh to me too.  Im waiting for a future patch where they add new hair styles, or alternate character models to the game, but until then I will just tolerate it and not let it get in the way of me enjoying the game.

Well, thats about it for this post.  Sorry it wasn’t better planned out.  I just kinda wanted to do a brain dump into the blog to put SOME content up.