Vista update

So I’m still just really digging Windows Vista.

RC1 seems as stable as ever and I just can’t get enough of it.

Recently I started having problems with XP thinking there was no sound device present when clearly music or other audio events would play, and therefore my games thought there was no sound either so they wouldn’t load.

I don’t know what the deal was but it started happening around the time that I installed Vista on a secondary hard drive. The only modification that I can tell that it made to the primary hard drive was to modify the boot menu to update it to Vista’s with an option to load XP.

However, with the sound problem in XP and other goofyness, coupled with the fact that I actually spend more time on my computer at work versus this one here at home, I decided to wipe XP completely off the map and start fresh.

I even took that secondary hard drive, coupled with the primary that formerly held XP, raided them together in a strip for double the size and speed, and reinstalled Vista.

My wireless drivery was still modded from the first time so that loaded fine. The audio driver that I tried to load actually told me it wasn’t compatible with Vista and that I should visit www.realtek.co.tw to obtain one that was, so that was sweet.

The nVidia driver actually installed fine this time. I think last time, I launched the installer while connected via remote desktop, so that’s probably not a great idea.

After the drivers, everything else is up to date. I have the latest iTunes and I managed to preserve my library by exporting it on XP and then importing it to this installation. I did have to search-and-replace all instances of M:\ to D:\ because Vista renamed my M:\ drive which holds all my stuff, to D:\, presumably because it’s a SATA drive on the main bus, not part of a raid set, so Vista actually uses it boot. I had my BIOS set to boot from the RAID array but that didn’t work at all so I set it to the D:\ drive and it loads fine. I figured since there was a new BOOTSECT.BAK file on there, that something had changed. Not a problem though, I just have to get use to typing D:\ instead of M:\ when I want to find something.

I’ve launched some games that worked well in Vista, and most of them work. I have gotten Medal of Honor: Allied Assault to launch; Grand Theft Auto: San Adreas works from the last installation of Vista, and I think Half-Life 2 and its Steam-powered friends work too but I haven’t gotten around to trying.

The original Call of Duty will launch and play the music but the game menu only shows if I hit the windows key on my keyboard to bring up the start menu. Then I can only interact with the menu if I right click on my start bar, then my cursor becomes the game cursor and I can tediously navigate.

I haven’t found anybody yet who has tried original Call of Duty on Vista, so I don’t know what the solution is. I bet it has something to do with the nVidia drivers, but I’m running the latest Vista ones, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

The other reason (and probably the primary one) is that Vista comes with DirectX 10 and I don’t know of any games written specifically for 10, so if it’s not completely backwards compatible, there are bound to be issues.

Well I have a bit of the cold/flu that’s been going around so I’m going to zonk out and go to bed.

I have an advanced UNIX scripting class at HP’s Grand Rapids office over on Kraft tomorrow so that’ll be interesting – if I feel well enough to pay attention.

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