Re: Re-formatting from Vista to XP

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Patricia M. Godfrey"  on Mon, 07
May 2007 12:59:31 -0400


> One thing that does occur to me is that you cannot reformat (by which
> I assume he means repartition and format) modern humongous hard drives
> with DOS's fdisk. It chokes. Western Digital and Maxtor supply
> utilities (with the disk or on their Web sites) for doing this though.

Vista has a built-in partitioning utility. Works fine, and functions a lot
like Partition Magic (which M$ bought, so no coincidence) ...

Vista has its own boot manager, and people are triple-booting the bloody thing
with *nix and XP and whatever, so I don't understand why Dell wouldn't permit
that. Sounds like user error to me...

XyWrite v4.018 runs great under 32-bit Vista. No cursor hesitation that I
noticed (but then I tend not to notice it, because almost always running full
screen, where it isn't an issue). All that nonsense about Vista dumping DOS
was just so much hooey. Every DOS command I've tried works. The command line
interface is (almost)) completely familiar (a few new or different commands).
But the Vista GUI interface is more dumbed down than its predecessors. There is
a STAGGERING amount of security. Cautionary popups at every turn in the road.
Still, the more I hold hands with ordinary users, the more I see the virtue of
this security. Users are getting stupider and stupider -- relinquishing any
knowledge they ever had, in deference to the mouse and M$'s penchant for
pleasant euphemisms instead of traditional (tough) tech terms. Anything really
useful, like a Word macro, Microsoft makes nearly impossible for ordinary users
to install or adjust. Watching intelligent people struggle with IE security
settings makes me weep -- there's just no way anyone can be expected to figure
that nonsense out. These users really need to be protected from their own
ignorance (which Microsoft does little to dispel). That said, if you're behind
a hardware router, and you don't act foolishly, I don't see any more danger
than before. I disabled or degraded all of Vista's security, deleted the
pre-installed Symantec crap (which truly acts more like a virus than any other
program I know), killed unnecessary services -- and the result is surprisingly
lean and mean. I'm not recommending that anyone do this -- simply reporting my
result.

There are a few steps backward. The disk defragmenter is awful. The
half-baked euphemisms that mask the real meaning of things are legion now. Home
Premium, the most ubiquitous version, can't be compared to 2K or XP
Professional -- Remote Desktop, for example, is only available in the Business
and Ultimate versions.

But all in all, Vista is OK. Anyway, it's where we are. Still, I'm heading
back to Win2K. It's basically the same OpSys, and it does the job with fewer
irritations.