Vista and Me; part deux

When we last left off the installation of Vista Service Pack 1 was in progress. It finished up about 45 minutes later. My camera and browser problem were resolved.

So all in all it took me just under three hours to have a video chat via Google Talk.  I considered myself a lucky duck, to complete this task, without tech support from India. That was until I saw a television commercial for Windows 7.

This guy who claims to be a PC, is walking though his house bragging about how his laptop is playing music from a computer in a different room. Another laptop is streaming  movies to the TV. He can print photos from anywhere in his house, and watch the latest stock reports on anything with a LCD screen, as he gingerly saunters from room to room. All is well in the world, because he uses Windows 7.

Is this how my life should be? How could this be? Did he throw out all his old computers and stuff and buy twenty-five grand of gear to live in this Nirvana? Even if he did wouldn't there be hours loading music and movies. What about the horror of seeing the printer in the network window but still not being able to print. How about his low tech wife who keeps on downloading pretty screen savers with embedded viruses. What about that TV, did he just get lucky that it has the hardware for just this type of wireless connectivity? And I wish he mentioned what model of magic router allows all these devices to work together without any IP conflicts. Or maybe Windows 7 is really magic that can transform all your current appliances into sentient beings.. .  but I digress. . .

My question now is do I muddle through with the Vista that I have or cross over to the Valhalla that is Windows 7. Even if I upgrade the install process will most likely set me back a few more hours, not to mention some more cash.

The saga will continue . . .  in part 3 coming on Monday.

Vista and Me

With all the hub-bub about Windows 7 lately,  I am wondering what this might mean to our future, or at the very least the future of my Toshiba Satellite M205 Laptop.

I purchased my Toshiba Satellite M205 Laptop when a freak "kicked power cord" accident prematurely ended my Acer 15" XP running duty cyle. While I'm not a devote techie, I know how to shop for a computer, at least I thought I did. The Satellite had some impressive specs, I was sure that this puppy would scream, at least in the XP world that I was used to. I plunked down my $700 at Circuit City and went home like a warrior with a fresh kill to feed his village.

Upon the 1st power up I was bitten by The Vista Bug, and it was incurable. The Toshiba Satellite M205 Laptop is not capable of running XP, at least not without following a gazillion step process of finding and installing various drivers and other deep tech tasks. My choices were Brick or Vista. The result was somewhere in the middle. The machine was dreadfully slow. It has all the Vista trappings, there was the constant battle with pop-ups, and it seemed like it was in a perpetual state of updates. I did not lose hope! This was a dual core machine with 2 gigs of ram, it must need just a bit more help, so back to the store, for  4 gigs of ram. (when in doubt add ram). Once installed and rebooted, I was faced with the fact that Vista can only use 3 Gigs of ram. The full 4 gigs  is there and working correctly but the system just doesn't use it.  You think the guys selling the ram would of mentioned that.

So now this laptop is turning into a hobby project rather than a business tool. Once I tried to install Apple's safari and itunes. The programs would disappear at the next restart. I tired the install 3 times with the same results. Then just gave up. I re-installed vista from the back-up disks, turned system options off and on, and after a long while found Vista to be kind of stable, kind of okay.

It is what it is.
I work on a desktop 90% of the time so the laptop really just become a nice office decoration, that I used basically as an expensive net-book. I have now reached a point where I needed the Laptop for a video conference through Google Talk, simple right? Not a chance. The camera and mic work fine , expect there is some conflict that when used through the browser does not allow me to see my image or the image from the other camera. Two hours of surfing led me to the answer that I need to install Vista Service Pack 1, to fix this problem. I started this a 10:45am EST, its now 12:17 and I'm at Stage 1 of 3 84% complete.