Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I figure that while I was playing musical OS's with my 40 gb hard drive on the Toshiba laptop that I might as well give Vista RC2 a spin. After RC1 turned the laptop into a clam shell on the last try I had pretty much given up on doing that again. My experience with Linux this week gave me enough reason to try this again. After all, what is the worst that could happen? I would have to put the dreaded Toshiba recovery cd back in and reboot and restore the laptop to factory defaults. How many times have I done this in the last 2 months? I have lost count. LOL
The first install of Vista locked up the laptop. I am not sure what happened so I turned the laptop off for several minutes, restarted it and gave it try number 2. Heck, you cant say you gave it a Boy Scout effort if you just give up when a computer freezes up right? In this case the second try was the charm. I left it running and went to church to attend the weekly praise team practice and left my son Justin watching the laptop as it installed the new OS.
As luck would have it the install went flawlessly and when I got home after practice I was greeted with the initial desktop setup screen which allowed me to set up specific user paramaters that would allow me to log on to the desktop. So far so good by this point. The install process rebooted the laptop several times and before you know it I was running with Vista RC2 without any major catastrophes. The first test for me was to insert the Linksys Wifi card into the same pcmcia slot and see what happened. What happened caused me to smile because Vista saw it immediately and started installing Broadcom wireless driver software for it. I dug around in the network setup section and figured out how to connect to my WAP here at home. I can not begin to tell you how happy I am that Microsoft has completely screwed up the networking configuration in Vista. Then again that is outside the scope of this article so I will visit that again as I learn more. I was very suprised that Vista identified the wireless adapter as a Broadcom and not Linksys which is the brand. The wireless Linux gurus at work told me that the Linksys card probably uses the Broadcom chipset and that is why that happened. I guess you learn something every day huh? I removed the broadcom drivers, reinstalled the Linksys Wifi manager and drivers and rebooted. Guess what? The wifi manager would not run and the drivers for the Linksys wifi card were not recognized by Vista. So, you know the drill, out with Linksys drivers and software, rebooted and let Vista work magic with its Broadcom drivers all over again. Heck , if it is not broke why fix it??
I am happy to report that over all I am pretty happy with Vista RC2. I have serveral hurdles to overcome and the immediate one will be to figure out how to do this and that in this OS vs XP SP2. In an effort to remove any and all security risks in the OS Microsoft has screwed the lid down on the pot so tightly that you have to pull out a screw gun and take all the screws loose so you can see what is happening under the hood. That probably did not make sense as far as word pictures go but hopefull you got that. LOL
My first software snafu came when I tried to install and USE Incredimail. For some of you that wont be a huge loss especially if you dont use it for email. However I am not so fortunate because a good friend of mine got me stuck on Incredimail long ago and now I feel creatively crippled when I can not use all of the cool stationary and animated gizmos that comes with this email client. The application installs just fine however when the app starts up and the notifier starts up to tell you that you have new mail the application locks tight as a drum. Vista now has a cool software widget that TELLS YOU the obvious. " Incredimail is experiencing a problem and will now be shut down. Before we kill the processes involved we will see if we can peek under the hood and fix it for you." So far all the widget really does is confirm the blantantly obvious fact that the app is frozen. The other thing it does is give you a handy dandy little link to the website of the software manufacturer. I bet Google is pretty hacked off about that functionality. LOL.... Hey honey, how can I figure out where to find the Incredimail website dear? How about www.incredi...... OH STOP IT.... LOL
Our next stop in the software discovery zone last night was in Microsoft Vista Widget land. Vista has a desktop application launcher like Rocketdock. However , from what I can tell you can only use Microsoft Widgets that they developed and I dont think you can drag normal apps in there to use. Please understand that I am still a rattle shaking toddler when it comes to this OS so I might be wrong about that. As of now I have the following widgets showing on my desktop along with my desktop icons which I will remove later if I can. At the top I have the Weatherbug widget , in the middle I have the analog clock widget and under that is the CPU/MEM system widget and at the bottom I put a calculator widget since I am always and forever figuring out how much moola I need to give away to the creditors. LOL...
My third stop in software discovery zone today happened to be with Symantec Anti Virus which is provided for free by the college where I work. I plugged my laptop into the work LAN and downloaded the latest and greatest version of Norton Anti Virus by Symantec. I spent at least 2 hours trying to get Norton Live Update to work only to find out that version 10.1 does not work with Vista but version 10.2 does. On my first install of the new version that is supposed to work with Vista Live Update did not install correctly and all of my pretty icons turned into white place holders. I was pretty excited about that developement, let me tell ya. I decided to reboot the PC thinking that maybe I needed to after a major install of an AV product even though I thought it was weird that it did not prompt me to do it anyway. When I rebooted the pc I was greeted by the dreaded recovery screen as if I had pushed F8 on boot up. I was once again reminded my Microsoft that there was a problem in software land and the OS was having a problem booting. Imagine that huh? I would have never known except for the pretty logo that was supposed to be there was GONE..... LOL
In a desperation attempt I clicked on the trusty and faithful LAST KNOWN GOOD menu selection and I was greeted by a pretty Vista logo and the logon screen. When I finally landed back on my user desktop GUI all of my icon place holders were once again pretty icons. Woooohooooo. Vista was happy but Norton Anti Virus was not. After several attempts I managed to get Live Update reinstalled and working. Live Update is doing what it is supposed to be doing however the definition file screen is not showing todays date yet. After researching the specific error on Google I was told to delete all the live update index files etc and that is supposed to fix that problem finally. I will play around with that tomorrow.
I have Microsoft Office 2003 installed with no problems and I installed AVS Video Tools on the laptop and I am converting some video files to .wmv format with no problems. I am noticing that AVS is a cpu hog as it has the cpu system clock pegged solid at 100%. I am pleased to say that out of 1 gb of ram on my laptop it is only using 33% of the available ram.

James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net