Re: Vista (was TAME without pain)

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Michael Norman wrote:
> At the university, I notice that the computer store's main DELL desktop
> comes with XP only. I'm leaning that way.
Well, my own experience is that it's not as great as MicroSludge
would want you to believe, but not as horrible as some techies
would have it. Some points:
Search doesn't work, and Explorer is very feeble: if you try to
tell it to find every file on a drive (or even in a large
directory) of a certain pattern (*.TMF, say, when I was trying to
answer Fred's question), Explorer.exe "stops working."
Fortunately, one can always go to a DOS Prompt and type
DIR D:\*.TMF (or whatever) /s /p, and get what one wants.
The eye candy (Aero, dissolving fades, and the like) can be
turned off. So can UAC, which is the chief of the security
measures that won't let you do anything. But if you're using a
public hotspot (which I rarely do, esp. now that I have my
cellular modem), you're probably better off leaving it on. Make a
separate profile to use there.
In my experience, Xy (and dBase) run fine on Vista--better than
on W2K or XP, in fact, but I have always maintained hardware is a
factor in that. But XyWin won't run at all.
I _never_ patch a system after it's fully set up. No doubt that's
risky, but I don't use Internet Exploiter or Outtaluck Express,
don't let sites download plug-ins, don't use Flash apps, and in
general try to practice safe computing. But I've heard too many
horror stories about updates trashing perfectly good apps and
features. I also do not want to submit to the insult of
Validation and the spayware of WGA. So my system is as it came
from the manufacturer, and--knock wood--it pretty much works as
advertised.
That said, I should definitely get Acronis True Image or Nortom
Ghost or something similar, so you can make periodic system
images. My Acer came with a built-in util that lets me make an
image on my (pre-partitioned) hard drive, then save it to a DVD-R.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx