I recently purchased a Dell Studio 17 that shipped standard with Vista Home Premium. Now, typically I would have paid more to have Ultimate if I didn’t already own my own copy. I posted about that fiasco on the forums if you’d like to see what happened there (see the last two posts on that thread).

Since the Vista installation on the laptop is the first real hands-on I’ve had with the OS, I tried to embrace it with an open mind. I booted up, went through the normal setup things and got up and running fairly quickly. The first thing I did was turn off the UAC notifications since, being the type of person that performs admin level activities on a minute by minute basis, it gets quite annoying. (Note – you might be asking how I knew to do that if I had no real hands-on until my laptop got to me. Well, I deal with the OS daily from a support stand point and have had to fight against it quite a bit). All in all, the first day went well. I got my email setup with Windows Mail, downloaded Firefox 3 and AVG, played with the Dell Dock a bit (kind of neat but shouldn’t be necessary if Microsoft had done it’s job), changed around my sidebar options, etc, etc. Then I started realizing how much junk was pre-installed on my system. Google Desktop, Dell Dock, a ton of Dell apps for the built-in webcam, photo/video editing/archiving, and on the list goes. So I spent some time just uninstalling software I didn’t want while enjoying some YouTube hilarity.

Once I got all situated, I decided to try to break it. I setup Task Manager to open with windows so I could watch the memory usage. Windows comes up, task manager loads, 800MB, 850, 1GB, then stopped at 1.4GB. Shocked, I just looked at the number for a few seconds then started checking the processes that were running. “Surely not,” I thought out loud to myself. “Surely this isn’t what a clean boot up requires.” Almost every single process that was running was necessary except for about 30MB of stuff that I could do without. That’s disgusting. Half of the memory my laptop shipped with is being taken up by my OS. Are you serious? This is a problem for me.

“Wait a minute… I know what this is.” I say thought out loud to myself again. “It’s all the graphical stuff. Right? The fuzzy-see-through window edges, window transitions, glossy boxes… Yeah. That’s what it is. Has to be.” So I set it all back to “classic” (aka “ugly”) mode and restarted the computer.

1.3GB

Wait.

I blinked my eyes.

I chuckled to myself.

I saved a tenth of a gig by turning off all the pretty colors?

Unacceptable.

Keep in mind, this is with nothing extra loading at boot. I walked over to my desktop running XP pro and booted it up. With all of my start-up apps I had less than 600MB. If I did my math right, which I’m pretty sure I did because I used a calculator, that’s a SEVEN HUNDRED MEGABYTE boot-up memory foot print difference and with drastically different start-up extras (vista having NO start-up extras, XP having all my normals including Thunderbird, Firefox 3 with four tabs open, AVG, ATI software, and task manager). That’s more than half a gig!

Not only is navigating Vista much more difficult than it should be, it was just developed badly. From a software giant like Microsoft I expect much more. Apple products are simply too expensive to switch over to entirely. Not to mention the fact that the Mac OS isn’t built for a programming environment. Which leads us to a free, simple, pretty, low resource requirement solution… Linux.

Some times I just hate the OS market.

- john

disgruntled vista user

Is it just me, or has the webcomic world gotten a little boring lately? Take PvPonline for example. The story we’re involved in now is a relationship drama. Best friends being pitted against each other and in this kind of emotional turmoil. Where did the “funny” go? I read 3 panels of pain to get a quick one-liner at the end?

And what happened with Ctrl+Atl+Del? The loveable girlfriend loses her baby via miscariage? Are you serious? This is really heavy stuff here guys.

I am a major supporter of the story-based webcomics where you have a pervasive plot and it’s entertaining all the way through. Penny Arcade is one of the only comics that I enjoy where the main characters follow only a slightly similar plot all the way through. Most of the time it’s random events and conversations between the characters. That’s not normally my cup-of-tea but they pull it off very well. PA’s biggest point-scoring aspect, to me, is that their comics are smart and to the point. It’s possible to do 3 to 4 panels of incredible comicy-goodness. See Three Panel Soul if you don’t believe me (or even if you do believe me… it’s a great comic).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all “dissing on” (that’s the hip term for talking bad about someone still right?) the guys at Ctrl+Alt+Del or PvPonline. They’re great writers. Their comics have held my attention this long even through the depressing and emotionally draining time we’ve been having for a couple of months now. I’m just ready for a change of pace.

So, in the light of pace change, I have found a couple of new comics that are random and quite fun.

XKCD – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – This comic just gets better and better the more I read it. There’s no real plot and no real consistent characters which is something I haven’t ever really liked until this comic came along. A warning, though, there are things you simply will not get unless you have a background of math or computer programming.

Chainsawsuit – Totally random. No characters. Just lots and lots of updates and funny scenarios. Lots of word play. Very fun.

If the emotional roller-coaster of PvP or Ctrl+Alt+Del is getting to you, take a stroll through our comic list and check out those two I listed above then tell us what you think on the forums!

- john

hoping you’ll enjoy

From Gizmodo.com.

Physical Media: World’s Largest Record Collection is Worth $50 Million; No One Wants it for $3 Million

Paul Mawhinney ownes a record collection of 3 MILLION albums and 600,000 CDs. This collection has been appraised at $50 million in value. He is offering it for sale on his website for a mere $3 million and he is having trouble selling it. It is unbelievable that such a collection were not wanted by a bevy of persons wishing to preserve such an awesome collection. If I had the means, I would surely jump at this opportunity. As Gizmodo says:

In a time when you can access pretty much whatever music you want online, hard copies of albums are declining in value, both monetary and sentimentally. But to see such a mindblowing collection as this sitting in a basement, unwanted, is really heartbreaking. This is historic, no matter that we live in the iPod era or not, and it belongs in a museum.

This definitely belongs in a museum! I beg of everyone to spread the word on this. If the interest is out there, the people could even come together to donate this to a worthy institution that would not only be ecstatic to receive such a collection and have the resources to preserve it as well. Candidates would include music hall of fames or universities where music or arts are a prime concern.

While perusing the latest news on Ars Technica this morning, I stumbled upon an interesting tid-bit about Dell shipping an Ubuntu based laptop by the end of the week.

Here’s the article from Ars.

Looking at the specs I’m a little disapointed that it’s as small as it is, but that’s not such a bad thing. The rest of the specs look pretty solid. My sincere hope here is that a more main stream view of Linux could change the face of the OS and software suite markets if it catches on. I’m not a ‘down-with-microsoft’ type of person at all, don’t get me wrong. I love the development environments they have (Visual Studio, etc…). They have built some very good software (Windows NT 4.0 comes to mind). I would just very much like to see options available to all users, not just advanced users. I think this is a good chance for that to happen.

- john

hopeful

This is an interesting visual display. One of the things I found most interesting things I noticed was the lengthening of the images closer to the bottom tank due to the velocity increasing.

I had oiginally seen this on Snotr, but their embedding system is a iframe to the raw flash file and WordPress apparently does not like iframe. Not to worry, everything ends up on youtube.