I’ve been a busy wee beaver. In Canada the Beaver is a noble animal. No really. And I have been one. I haven’t seen one, but I have been one. I did see racoons the other night though. They are big. Big and fluffy. Completly uncaring of my presence nearby. Anyway I have been busy.
We got a projector a while back. An Optoma HD70. A budget range projector that can handle widescreen. We have been using it for a few weeks but have just returned it because the focus wasn’t sharp enough. I want the supplier to test it and tell me if that is normal, either for the HD70 or for any new HD projector in the budget category. I may have to get a better model but there is a real big jump in price. What to do.
We’ve also decided to get into the new age and get a VOIP handset. Haven’t really given it a run for its money yet, but will probably use Skype to surprise someone this weekend.
Also got a fat ish hard disk. Which I chucked in my pc last night. 320 GB is a big jump from 80 odd that was in there. Next stop Vista RC2.
After puzzling over the inability of my usb keyboard to activate the “Press any key to boot from CD ROM” I finally found a BIOS setting that enabled legacy PS2 support. That was completely un-related to Vista, just a motherboard setting I had wrong.That fixed I set about installing Windows Vista RC2
It went very smoothly. The pre-installer is a lot nicer looking than XP and very streamlined. No issues and no errors and not so long to complete. All in all pretty seamless. I was disappointed with a couple of unavailable drivers. One is for the ubiquitous 3 Com 3C905B NIC which is bound to cause a few headaches for anyone with an older business style desktop. Perhaps the full version will have more comprehensive driver set. Then again perhaps it is considered too legacy.
More disappointing however was the lack of support for my M-Audio Audiopile USB external sound card. I have scoured the web but can’t seem to have any luck with locating drivers that work on Vista. They probably aren’t far away probably out in time for the consumer release of Vista in February next year.
It has been a bit of a shock to discover that my PC really can’t handle Vista’s visual effects. And I an not talking about the slick Vista Aero theme, just the Vista Basic theme. I have a 4 year old Radeon 8500 DV with 128 MB RAM and it seems to be struggling with even the Vista Basic visual effects. I guess it is no wonder I can’t enable the visually intense Aero Theme then.
Overall I am really enjoying the look and feel of it, but it will take a while to find where everything is again. I’ll post some screen shots up over the weekend once I’ve got Photoshop installed etc.
Hey paradineshift,
Good to hear you are beavering away. All good here, off to Oz in Jan. Yay!
Im pretty sure vista and office will be a world wide release at the same time on Nov 30.
Off to OZ permanently like? Or just to check it out? It will be good for you! You’ll love it.
Vista is worldwide release Nov 30th but only for Business. Retail doesn’t ship until 30th Jan.
Microsoft has announced that Windows Vista will be broadly available as a stand-alone product or pre-installed on new PCs on January 30, 2007.
Windows Vista will be made available to Volume License customers later in the month of November 2006.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.aspx
So Vista is pretty cool. I’ve got things sort of set up how I want but I generally find it is sluggish. I think the unavailability of ATI drivers for my Radeon 9700 DV are probably the biggest bottleneck
Just for anyone that happens to be looking at this post for info on the Optoma HD70 – you may want to know that I returned it because I wasn’t happy with the focus…
Hello,
I was interested to know if you experienced any issues with getting the projector to work with Vista? I have an older (4 yrs?) InFocus X2, and Vista does NOT like it one bit. Seems to cycle through all the possible resoultions, and not settle on one. Can’t seem to figure it out…
Thanks!