Chris Meller

I was checking out the new K2 style that I just activated, scrolling through some archives, and stumbled upon Go Flock Yourself from just shy of a year ago.

In it, I link to what I thought was a very funny post over at Flock Sucks. I clicked on the link, hoping to relive some of the funny memories, and was greeted with an unfortunate realization: not only has Wordpress.com made it incredibly easy for users to create their own blogs, but they’ve also made it unfortunately easy for them to delete them as well…

That’s too bad. I mean, the last time I stopped by (quite some time ago) they’d transitioned into some randomly meaningless blog shouting profanity and doing some kind of weird story-log concept. Still, there was some good content back there at the beginning, and now it’s all gone…

The series goes on with three new observations…

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the default homepage for Internet Explorer is no longer the massively ad-infested monster that is MSN. Instead, we’re now presented with the lighter, friendlier, much cleaner Live homepage that’s sure to please the Google-lovers out there.

Also, I was quite happy to see that my basic Group Policy settings for my XP machines were properly retrieved and run on my newly domain’d Vista machine. Logging in with my domain user account and popping up Windows Explorer showed me all my usual mapped network drives, thanks to my logon scripts. It’s the simple things that make transitions like this all the more pleasant…

I still wish the logon screen would default to a domain account on the first reboot after joining a domain. If I just joined a domain, why would I still want to login to the local machine? In XP, this is merely clicking a button to display the login drop-down box and selecting your domain from the list. With Vista, we’ve made it an extra click - Login as another user, Login as another user, type in credentials. No more drop-down list goodness… Like I said, it’s the simple things. They can make the transition more pleasant, but they can also make it a much larger pain in the ass…

Continuing the series with random observations as I finish the installation and configuration of Vista on my laptop, I love the way windows fade in and out. It’s very soothing and smooth. I can’t help but notice, however, that the window prompting you if you really want to perform an administrative function (since I’m an administrator) doesn’t fade in or out like that. All of a sudden, bam, your screen is grayed out and you’ve got a new popup window in your face. I know it’s supposed to get your attention, but it seems a tad too abrupt to go with the rest of the overall theme of Vista.

Joining my domain here at home was painless - just like joining the domain with an XP machine. Since I had no physical network connection during setup, I wasn’t prompted to join the domain immediately after setup like you would be on XP. I’m not sure if this functionality exists in Vista as well, but it’d have been really nice if I’d been able to connect to a wireless network and join a domain before logging in the for the first time. Since my wireless did actually work as soon as a logged in, I don’t see why that couldn’t be accomplished. I guess you also have to consider that most comapnies running a domain are going to have some type of rollout process that will have an automated script do all the leg work. Low priority, sure, but it’d be a nice addition if you ask me…

I finally got sick of staring at the personalized settings window as it made no progress. I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to the new Vista set of options. After checking Task Manager to make sure there wasn’t actually anything going on, I locked the computer and logged back in. Still nothing…

Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del again, I clicked ‘Log out’, and instantly saw the Personalized Settings window flip through the rest of its options and was dumped back to the logon screen. Logging in again, I was instantly on my desktop.

After picking my wireless network and entering my WPA key, I was back up and running on the ‘net. I noticed a tray icon indicating that no audio hardware was installed, but before I could do anything about it, Vista was popping up notifying me of updates to install - one of which was a SigmaTel C-Major Audio driver (in addition to a Windows Defender definitions update and a new Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG driver update).

All three updates were downloaded within seconds, a restore point was created for my system, and the two real updates (both of the drivers) were installed about a minute later.

Without a reboot, both drivers were installed, and my audio was working. I notice that the media buttons on the front of my laptop don’t give any visual indication of working, but the audio controls do actually change the volume. That’s slightly annoying (How loud is my volume right now?), but as long as they do actually work, I don’t see it to be a big problem.

Welp, installing Vista RC2 (Build 5744) on my Dell Inspiron 9300 was flawless… Until I logged in.

For 15 minutes now, I’ve been staring at the swirling replacement for the hour glass, reading the “Personalized Settings” box over and over, claiming it’s setting up personalized settings for Microsoft Windows Mail 7.

I guess I’ll just let it sit there. Even though there’s no noticeable hard disk activity, what do I have to lose?