![]() Windows Vista - The Saga
Submitted Tuesday, March 27, 2007 - 3:40:51 PM by Klaitu
So, I decided to take the plungs, upgrade myself to Windows Vista. Why? Well, I got bored. I wish I could say that I was totally sold on Vista beforehand, and that I "must have" it, but really.. I just wanted to fancy up my computer.
Step 1: Obtain neccessary parts. I needed the Vista software, that much was a must.. and I figured while I was out I would get myself a bonzer hard drive and a little more memory. I set a budget of $300 for all these things.
My dad suggested that they might have all this stuff for cheap at Sam's Club. Now, I don't usually go there because I'm not a member (and I dont need a 50 gallon drum of peanut butter). My parents, however are.
So I go to Sam's Club with my mom in tow to do the member thing. I find the neccessary parts, and proceed to the checkout, where I received a suprise! Sam's Club doesn't take Visa.
Visa of all things! Everyone has a visa card. Sam's Club takes Discover card only. Why? Nobody knows! Nobody has a Discover card!
It did, however, provide me with ample opportunity to ridicule a Sam's Club manager for their poor policy. I remember the words like it was yesterday (It was yesterday):
"So, I'm here, I want to pay you 300 bucks for all this stuff. I've got the money, it's just that sam's wont take it? That's a silly policy, don't you think, because now You've got to have someone restock this stuff, and I'll pay one of your competitors for the exact same items. Maybe you should speak to your boss about not taking money from customers."
The manager really didn't have anything interesting to say, except that "Its sam's club policy" to which I responded "I know, and I know you can't change it, but it's a stupid policy"
So, I went to Best Buy and bought a little bit better items, which cost me 10 bucks more than Sam's Club would have.
Step 2: Install everything. I tried the memory first, it was ddr2 RAM when I needed just DDR ram. I tried the hard drive. It was serial ATA instead of IDE. Fortunately, Windows Vista installed without complaint.
Step 3: Return improper crap. So, I had to go back to best buy today to exchange my crap. It's no wonder I couldn't find a good hard drive. Best buy only had external USB drives and internal notebook drives. They don't carry desktop drives anymore.. at all apparently. They did, however have desktop memory in the DDR flavor. So I dropped the drive and picked up an extra gig of ram instead.
This time it worked.
Windows Vista itself is pretty shiny, it's got a well-polished user interface. in some cases they "made things easier" (which means that they just made things harder). In a nutshell, Vista is exactly like XP with a fancy user interface.
If you haven't upgraded, there is no rush. If you've got the opportunity to do it, go ahead, it's neat. It's by no means neccessary at this point.
Vista does have some tricks under the hood though. I have a Soundblaster Audigy soundcard. Vista didn't have a driver for it, so it went online, found the driver, installed it, and then told me that it went ahead and took care of it for me. I checked, and it did it right.
So, Windows Vista? Not the scary thing you might think!
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