Reviewers Recommend Sweat Equity 5 - review by Captain Jack Director: Laurent Sky, Julia Grandi Starring: April Snow, Sawyer Cassidy, Serenity Cox, Eva Generosi. Read review
So a couple of days after I swore I wouldn't touch Vista with a ten foot....ummmm, whatever, I woke up, went to bring my computer out of standby and nothing happened. Well, that's not entirely accurate, I did hear some strange noises and smelled a nice burning stench.
So I dug into my computer, thinking maybe there was something I could do. I can usually fix a hardware problem if something just needs to be replaced. Well, I narrowed it down to the power supply. And knowing that a power supply will often take the motherboard with it when it goes, I decided just to get a new system. It was getting about time anyway. Several years.
So I was hoping I could still find one with XP on it. No such luck. Every stinkin' one of them had Vista! So I picked one that had fairly decent specs (for the price). Pentium 4 3 Ghz, something like 1,300 megs of RAM and a 250 gig HDD.
Got everything set up....everything works, with some annoying quirks. One thing....I can hear the hard drive accessing every few seconds, constantly! WTF could it possibly be doing? Never had that problem with XP. So, I thought it might just be using the swap file a lot. I turned off all the fancy graphical features and indexing and all that. I launched the task manager and it doesn't appear to be using anywhere enar all the physical memory. So what the fuck is it doing?
Oh....and my photo folders....I can no longer sort them by date...which sucks because that was how I kept track of my photos. Now they're just all over the place.
And Vista loves to ask you if you're sure you want to do something a thousand times before it'll let you do it. It does this every time you go to delete something or change a setting.
Ugh! This all sounds very discouraging, particularly the annoying read/writes to disc. How big is your swap file?
I also don't like the sound of this
or this...The engineers at Microsoft love to tweak things to death. I sure hope there are workarounds to this sort of nonsense. I'm hoping I don't have to buy another PC for a while, but shit happens (as it just happened to you - sorry about that)
Although it does much more, you basically use this as a substiture for Windows Explorer (although Explorer will still be available should you want to use it). It will allow you look at your files and folders almost any way you want. Far superior to Explorer.
I think it's just over a gig. I still haven't figured out what it's doing. The accessing thing is annoying for one thing because I just don't like the noise. But also, I'm thinking that's gotta put some significant wear and tear on the hard drive. Not that I don't have a spare drive laying around somewhere if I absolutely needed it but you know...you lose everything if you crash and that sucks. I suppose it could be running out of RAM. I just don't see how at over a gig. My old XP machine only had 300 and some odd megs and it ran fine for years that way. Took everything I threw at it except for serious games.
#SDNY he's all yours. -- Michael Steele 5110 Posts 3/03
Posted - Feb 19 2007 : 1:40PM
It might be that you went from a system with an essentially silent hard drive, like a Seagate, to one with a noisy drive, so you're now hearing everything it does.
There are various things about the Vista file manager thing that I don't like, but you should definitely be able to sort folders by date; just click on the column heading. Click on it again to switch from ascending to descending. If the problem is that the date isn't even one of the columns displayed, you can change that.
One thing that drives me nuts on my Vista beta system, and that I'm curious whether you're experiencing: when you click on a .jpeg file, does it seem like it takes the picture viewer application a ridiculous amount of time to launch itself and display the picture?
Well, there is a date column but it's for "Date Taken" rather than "Date Modified" as it was in XP. Sorting by the date the file was last modified kept things in order exactly as I saved them. That doesn't seem to be an option with Vista.No. I'm not having that particular problem. What image viewer are you using? I've been using Irfanview for years. It's not sleek and sexy but it gets the job done
Yeah...my old primary drive was a Seagate. I was gonna use it as a secondary in my new system. Unfortunately, the new system is SATA and the old drive is PATA. That was a damn good drive, too...practically new!
There is another option you might try to lessen the disk access, and that's use the memory boost feature, all you need is a compatible USB thumb drive or card reader. It must also match your current ram allotment or double, in your case 1GB or 2GB. What this does is create a huge scratch file on the USB drive and any pages will be written to the drive (as well as your main disk) so when it needs to reload them it will look there first and load it if it finds it, this should lessen the access to the page/swap file.
Why not try and replace the power supply? They're not expensive, and maybe the rest of the components are undamaged.In that case, I would have first cloned the contents of the original drive over to the new one (using Norton Ghost), bought a copy of XP, and run a "repair install" on the cloned copy.Maybe you have a noisy hard drive, and there's a Vista utility or service running that regularly accesses the hard drive? I don't have that problem with Vista x64 Business, but that machine has 2gb of RAM and a quiet Seagate 500gb hard drive that I'd bought specifically for the Vista upgrade.
Despite Vista's slick UI, I've gone back to XP x64, because it's rock-solid, driver-wise, doesn't have the annoying problems network connections mysteriously dropping, and my existing software packages are already compatible.
It sounds like microsoft's resource hogging security "features". Supposedly Vista checks to make sure you own a legitimate copy repeatedly. You know you own a legit copy, but microsoft doesn't really care, they'll check anyways over and over again.
Vista is also a RAM hog. Instead of using your RAM for your applications you now have to use a ton for Vista. 1 gig of RAM isn't a lot for Vista, it's recommended that you have 2+ gigs.
Yeah...it just blows my mind that it's using that much RAM. XP ran more or less fine on a third of that. This is what happens with monopolies, I suppose.
Do what I did. Go to Wal-mart and put $100 down for Windows XP Home, the asses didn't have Professional, which I have on two CDs, but unable to use for this 'puter. I had to buy something I already owned, since my harddrive got fucked up the ass by a piece of shit software. I had to reformat the harddrive, and buy the OS again, because my computer didn't come with the reinstallation disc.
I only backup files and programs I will miss if something happens to the 'puter. But not having the OS really sucked ass.
I will give up computers before I switch to Vista. Nothing I've read about it interests me in the least.
- -B -I -G -m -i -k -e, here and there, over and out! - -
You sound at least as upset as I would be. But I'd have probably thrown something.
I was looking at XP the other day but the box said it would only function as an upgrade if you already had 98 or 2000 on your system. I dunno. Maybe I was looking at the wrong thing.
Vista might actually be OK...someday. But anyone who switches early is gonna have to deal with all the bullshit, the glitches, the bugs, the patches, the apologies (or lack thereof), the BSOD over and over, the incompatibilities. Nice.
I was plenty upset, I had 5 DVD isos sitting on my harddrive that I wanted to burn. And yes, I threw something, a punch into my countertop, and stopped before I punched a hole in my wall.
The Windoughs XP Home said Upgrade only too, but since I had no OS installed, there was nothing for it to search for, and I installed it fresh. I woulda done the same thing had I had an OS and wanted to upgrade to the newer version.
- -B -I -G -m -i -k -e, here and there, over and out! - -
I hate to tell you this, but if you can boot from the cd drive you can install XP on any disk without deleting/removing the current partition/os. It will see the OS and ask if you wish to install into another directory.
They used to require that you purchase at least one piece of hardware with the OEM versions (as little as a ten cent cable or something like that), but it doesn't look like they're doing that now.
Sweat Equity 5 - review by Captain Jack
Posted - Feb 19 2007 : 10:38AM
