Ok. After building my new computer, I needed an operating system. I’m not into piracy, so I didn’t want to re-use my xp CD if I was going to keep it on the old computer. I wanted 64 bit XP, but a friend of mine had a copy of Vista business he would give to me so he could see if Age of Conan looks any better in Direct X 10 (it doesn’t). I’ve been on vista almost a week now, and here are my thoughts.
After all the terrible things I had heard, I really didn’t plan to switch for a while. They recently released service pack 1, however, so I was hoping most of the driver issues and whatnot had been sorted out, along with all the incompatibility problems (how? they have the full xp source at their disposal!). Some of it might be better, but I’ve still run into a lot of problems. Luckily, I’m on the back end of the first wave, so almost all the problems I’ve had have already been solved and there were plenty of forum posts with answers to my questions. I’m pretty sure I have TF2 and BF2 working now, although I haven’t actually tried BF2 yet 
. Age of Conan installed its 30 GIG (yes, GIG) just fine, but I’ve barely played it. More importantly, my dosbox version of X-Com runs decently 
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Those problems aside, and I really hate to admit this, but Vista is really growing on me. It has always looked really good, and I’ve never denied that, and that part of it is really nice. However, it’s the little things that make it more usable that I am really enjoying (like the speaker auto-detect). Even the big-brother confirm-you-are-actually-trying-to-run-this-program, while slightly annoying, will be more than worth it the first time it stops some malicious activity.
The only transition problem I haven’t yet solved is sound inside pyglet 1.1. 1.0 didn’t have vista support, but it seems like 1.1 should, so I still need to get that figured out. Luckily I’m not ubermanning right now – when I was I had to plug my speakers into the lappy every 4 hours so my alarm program would actually sound. It doesn’t even throw any errors – it just doesn’t play. If you have any input on this, please share.
Happily, my other python programs seem to work, most notably WPMC.
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