So I've written a few programs, finished setting up the machine, all that. 
I've only run across a couple of annoyances so far.

One, Microsoft's ass-brain decision that the standard per-file backup 
software should skip over files whose extension they don't recognise. So you 
tell it to back up everything, and it skips .exe files, .php files, etc. It 
only backs up "documents".  Huh?  Makes it utterly useless and to be coded 
around. So I wrote a script using vshadow.exe and robocopy to back up my 
home directory. Unfortunately, it isn't integrated into the "previous 
versions" the way the usual backup is.  Weirdness.

Two, when making copies of big files (by which I mean multiple files of tens 
of gig each), it'll sometimes just ... stop for a couple of minutes. It 
always comes back, but for a few minutes it'll putter along at 3MB/sec or 
so. Fortunately, the built-in resource monitor will tell you which processes 
are reading from or writing to which files and at what speed, and the task 
manager will tell you which services are running in which tasks. (Annoyingly 
(but for understandable reasons) you can have one process running a dozen 
unrelated services.) In this case, it seemed to be the "superfetch" service. 
I think there's some sort of priority-inversion bug, whereby you start 
reading a big file and superfetch comes in and says "Let me read-ahead that 
for you", but superfetch runs at a low priority and you wind up waiting on 
superfetch. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems to 
completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure out 
what was causing it.

Three, if you have two screens configured, and your video game starts up 
full-screen at a smaller resolution on one of the screens, it seems to punt 
your icons and taskbar around to undesirable places.   I never used dual 
screens under XP, so I don't know if this is usual, but I almost never had a 
screen-size change (via RDP for example) mess up my icons on XP.

Four, the new Media Center is in some ways more annoying and in some ways 
less annoying. I can't tell if it's just because I haven't used it enough to 
learn where everything went or whether it's just not meshing with me.

Five, as everyone says, tracking down how to set up your internet connection 
manually is rather a PITA. So far it has been a dozen clicks thru screens to 
try to guess whether it's "configure network hardware" or "set up a network" 
or "create a connection" or what. WTF guys?

Six, after you do something system-maintenancy (like chkdsk), stuff can get 
a bit ... slow. I think chkdsk does something like writing a bunch of 
changes to the journal on the disk, then finishes, and lets the next sync 
take care of dumping gigabytes to the disk or something. This, of course, 
makes the system rather unresponsive if you're trying to do something else 
disky. But, really, that's only after as administrator you say "go repair 
something", so it would seem to be pretty OK, if you ask me. BTW, if you 
plug an XP external drive into a Vista system (via USB, say), it'll be 
read-only until you run chkdsk /f on it. If you plug from Vista back to XP, 
it'll thrash a while, because XP doesn't understand Vista's volume shadows, 
so it goes through and deletes them.

Seven, some of the stuff you'd think would have a progress bar annoyingly 
doesn't. Apparently it's because the algorithms have changed and they can no 
longer figure out in advance how long something will take, but it's still 
annoying. :-)

Otherwise, so far, I rather like it. I have the task bar on the right edge 
of my left screen, and the sidebar on the right edge of the right screen, 
and I get plenty of room for everything. I can see why people like 
dual-screen work. I'm hoping I don't get durango-neck. (Program on one of 
these http://www.sydex.com/durango/durango.html for a week, and you'll see 
what I mean.)

I need to see if Second Life stops sucking when you get a high end computer 
with high-end graphics, or whether the problem really is their bandwidth.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message