You can literally cruise the vistas…

My home computer had been all wacky for the past… year or so. Not enough to warrant drastic measures such as troubleshooting, but enough to irritate me at times. But because of the sheer volume of data (I download several gigs per day – primarily concerts) the effort to move everything around, coupled with the ensuing downtime, has prevented me from taking matters into my own hand and throwing the POS out the window… I mean re-installing Windows.

The other night I finally got sick of the constant blank screens in the middle of watching videos (for the love of all that is holy I just want to see the damn kitten mew!), and figured some downtime would be a good thing. And midway from point A to point B I also decided it was time to jump back on that beta horse and check out Windows Vista – at least now that it’s hit RC1. So, after a couple of aborted attempts to get everything set, and a trip to CompUSA to replace my now confirmed crappy video card, I am cruisin’ the vistas at home.

It reminds of days of yore. At first I was a little nervous, and then I realized just how late in the game I was. I was telling a co-worker the other day that I never used Windows 95 – I jumped from Windows 3.11 straight to Windows NT 4.0 Beta 2. Once the final release came out I never looked back. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP, I hopped right on Beta 1 and worked my way through all of the bugs until RTM time rolled around. With Vista going gold in a couple months, this baby is ready for primetime.

And while there are certainly some compatibility problems with a few programs and drivers, the system is absolutely gorgeous. There are some things I have to get used to, but overall I really do love the way they’ve changed the interface. For now it looks like my potential fulltime switch to Ubuntu is on hold.

These issues, coupled with lots of work at… work, as well as a switch in my ISP has led to a lot of offline living at home. I just realized that it’s almost halfway through the first month of the rest of my life and I really haven’t said anything here – I’ve also barely been keeping up with my usual reads. Oh well, we all need a break from Internet from time to time…