The price of envy

[Silearth 6]

I bought a copy of Vista Home Basic from Ebay for $40.00--it should come today. And as soon as it comes I'm ordering the 64 bit replacement disk.

 

I thought about premium, and tried to get a cheap copy, but could not. Anyway, there is really nothing compelling in Premium that can't be replaced by some third-party freeware.

 

I started looking around the net for ways to make basic behave like premium and came across a download that promised to do this for XP as well as vista basic. I installed and restarted.

 

I was greeted by a Vista Ultimate log in. Once in windows, I had to full Aero theme going with glass and flip--the works. And it ran fast and smooth.

 

Of course, there were explorer crashes every few minutes, but they did not seem to affect me. Just an annoying popup every few minutes. After I got home from work, I noticed that I had no internet. I ran the wizard to no avail. Finally, I ran the install and selected 'remove'. I lost the glass, flip and sidebar but I still have the ultimate logon and other eye candy.

 

The most desturbing thing is that my documents are gone. My book, short stories, everything. I am not really worried, as I have my old harddrive in my system. It's unplugged now, but after I install vista I can recover my files. But it's still a lot of trouble because I was lusting over the Aero.

[Schot 407]

Gotta love those shiny new Aero toys. I had a blast with them when I first got Vista Prem but the novelty ended pretty quickly. 1 intensive photoshop session and some sessions running multiple instances of Sacred 2 had me turning off the bells and whistles pretty fast. Was fun while it lasted though but defintely Aero is just overkill. I doubt anyone that is aware of their system resources would bother with it for long.

 

Thank god you've got a backup though. Whew! Really wierd that you lost all that stuff.

[Silearth 6]

Lol. I had multiple backup's. One on my old drive, one on the kid's computer and some on the wife's drive.

 

Once I installed Vista, networking was so easy and sooooo fast. It's hard to believe that I gave up Vista last year and actually gave away the disk. What was a horrible experience on the Athlon 1.1 Ghz is a complete joy on this new box.

 

Vista gives me a score of 4.0(the wife is 3.8), and even with the sidebar and all the eyecandy basic can muster, everything is fast and smooth.

 

The only issue I have had is trying to do a clean install with full SATA mode. My DVD and harddrive are both SATA and it choked on the Vista DVD at boot. Also, my rating on PCPitstop(I know....) went from top 33% to top 50% due to a huge drop in drive performance.

 

But I guess if everything is running fine I should not worry about benchmarks.....Wintune, anyone?

 

By the way....The Crysis demo ran nicely at medium settings.