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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.
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