Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Monday 14 May 2007, 9:53 AM
Mo' Vista Blues....
Talking to a friend over the weekend -- he fixes people's PCs for a living, and has the best grasp on the reality of consumer computing of anyone I know -- I was interested to hear his opinion that Vista only really works in 2GB or more. 1GB is OK, 512MB is not. I'm currently reviewing a laptop that has 512MB of memory and the sticker "Vista Ready" on it: yeah, right. And I'm ready for the London Marathon.
He also said "Now I've been using Vista for a while, I'm beginning to find how flaky it is", and pointed to drivers as particularly vulnerable to the good old BSOD; he was also less than complimentary about the whiny interface that continually asks whether you really meant to say yes to the question it asked you last time.
Me, I was shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- to find that if you burn a CD under Vista, it's burned in a format that only Vista can read. You can choose to pick one of those old-fashioned formats readable by other, lesser beings (such as every other PC on the planet, Macintoshes, CD players, etc) but Microsoft won't let you set that as a default. Perhaps the company sees this as a "wow" factor: the ejaculation that escaped my lips was certainly monosyllabic.
PreviousComments on this post
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Me, I was shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- to find that if you burn a CD under Vista, it's burned in a format that only Vista can read. You can choose to pick one of those old-fashioned formats readable by other, lesser beings (such as every other PC on the planet, Macintoshes, CD players, etc) but Microsoft won't let you set that as a default. Perhaps the company sees this as a "wow" factor: the ejaculation that escaped my lips was certainly monosyllabic.
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No way! That can't be right surely?!? If it is, then that really is shocking. I think i'll stick with my XP Pro for now......
Pick the bones out of this Microsoft help document, which purports to explain why various different kinds of CD formats don't do what you want...
Common! Man!
Don't know your friend but that sounds litle bit unrealistic. I'm not very happy with Vista but it's still better than XP in many cases.
And about CD burning, maybe you have something terrible happening with your notebook, 'cause in my case CD burning went smoothly by default, and CD was readable in XP, 2000 and 2003. Nothing wrong with buring for now.
This comment has been deleted at the users request
This comment has been deleted at the users request
This must be the tip of the iceberg. What is hidden under the secret code promises to be unpredictably protective of many things. The major multimedia hardware vendors are still deciding whether or not to follow the strict specifications that will severely punish any attempt at violation of DRM. I am curious to see the actual outcome in a few weeks. Those multimedia hardware vendors are at risk of losing something regardless of their decision, and are looking for an alternative of minimum loss, perhaps helped by time.
