Experience with Vista

I am one of those, who love to hate the products from Redmond. I always preferred Linux for Operating system and Open Office for word processing. I am mostly against its blatant use of monopoly over the desktop software. However, frankly I find the GUI of Windoze much more smoother in operation than other OSs. (Never tried a Mac. PC though).

Finally, I went for Vista Home Premium. Got it installed on my PC, and the first thing that I expected it to do was to wipe out my XOSL boot loader from the MBR. It did! But what I did not expect was poor driver support, especially for my Sound Card and Ge Force 6200 video card. The SoundMax driver was automatically updated by Vista, however.

Tragedy struck when I played an AVI file in Windows Media Player 11. The screen went blank, and I received my first BSOD, after the era of Windows 98. It caused physical damage to my newly purchased SATA 250 GB drive. Frantic search on the Internet revealed that this a known problem, as NVidia is struggling to release stable drivers for Vista.

Yesterday, I however stabilized my PC. I purchased a new Barracuda 160 GB hard drive, and configured it as Primary Master. I had to use my existing installation of Vista to format the new disk drive. I re-installed and re-activated Vista.

Today I found a neat software, EasyBCD that provides a GUI interface to modify the Boot Loader of Vista. Now I am able to boot to my Linux partition as well. For video files I will wait for NVidia before they either give up releasing new drivers or release a stable one. In the former case, I will have to choose a different vendor for my next video card.

Now I am in friendship with Vista as it allows me the flexibility to switch to my favorite OS anytime I wish.