Ians Ramblings Ian's ramblings, daily, ish

Windows Vista

Having not posted a geeky one in a while I thought I would briefly describe experiences with Vista so far.

Firstly, the machine I installed Vista on, is a custom made P4 2.2 with 1.0 GB of RAM, 20 GIG IBM Deathstar hard disk, and a GeForce 3 Ti 200. As you can probably tell built from spares.

Firstly, booted off the DVD fine, and the installation went great, though the first colourful blue / green screen stayed there for about 5 minutes before moving onto the first steps of the actual installation.

The whole install process probably took 30 or 40 minutes, not massively more than XP took on the same machine.

Once installed the first bootup was fairly slow, but that was expected on first bootup, especially with un-optimised beta code.

Once inside, it looked nice and shiny, more or less like this screen shot, but I had turned off the background wallpaper.

I then wanted to register my copy to make sure it didn't just shut down after 13 days as it said, unfortunately the online registration kept failing, I assume because it was so busy. So I registered it over the phone, that worked fine.

I then had a play with installing third party software, such as Yahoo messenger, Msn messenger live and Filezilla, all of these installed perfectly and are running as we speak as shown below.

All in all was really rather impressed with it all, I know others have had issues with it even booting, so I think it really depends on how standard the hardware is.

Race for life

All has been going well with me in general of late, just the usual martial arts 3 times a week, still doing Silat, Eskrima and JKD. I am going up to visit my sister Emma at the weekend, to help with the setting up of one of her 'Race for life' events for Cancer Research UK. It's an event for women only, to support the work done by Cancer Research UK.

In other news, my Dad has set up his website now, for his design consultancy company, www.gydesign.co.uk. It shows a selection of the design work he has done for different companies in the past, as well as personal photography and fine art work.