I Killed Vista

Well, I managed to kill Vista within a couple days of getting it. I made the mistake of checking off "Show processes from all users" on the Task Manager only to have it disappear and never return as if it had disappeared into the Redmond Triangle. I tried opening it a few more times to no avail. So off to a command prompt I went but the taskkill command was impotent. So was Process Explorer. Resigned to a reboot, I figured I'd do so when my downloads had finished. I tried opening another program but, like the Task Manager, it too never appeared. Alas poor WinAmp, it then hung. I closed a couple open apps and then tried to reboot. This too failed so a hard boot it was.

In addition to taking Vista down, I found more annoyances. Firstly, I am unable to launch my newsreader application unless I run it as an administrator. This is odd since I am logged in as a user with admin rights. The program failed to modify a file that it installed and that was located in its installation directory. Was the application trying to modify the file using an account other than mine (he who launched it)? Obviously I need to learn more about Vista's security.

But not for this alone. There's no bloody Local Security Policy editor in the Home versions of Vista. How the hell do you lock it down for certain user accounts? Heck, maybe the standard accounts are useless and already locked down. Let's say you have a wayward teenager so you create a standard account for her. Can she logon and disable the anti-virus? Will she be able to map network drives? How do you prevent her from taking IE 7 out of protected mode or disabling the anti-phishing filter? Do you have to set permissions on folders so she can't run certain programs? Would she be able to modify the firewall? These aren't highly esoteric things that only concern power users in a business environment.

Lastly, I want to figure out how to modify the All Programs menu in the Start Menu. Right now it looks only slightly more organized than Hiroshima after its encounter with Little Boy back in the summer of '45. I want to group apps together instead of parsing a heinously long list.

On the bright side, Microsoft actually included a productivity program with Vista that I find useful – Windows Calendar. I had Mozilla Sunbird on my old PC and use it on my work computer so I was able to grab my calendar info from my box at work which was, for some odd reason, always more up-to-date than the one at home. Microsoft is to be commended for making it compliant with the iCalendar format which is widely used. Thusly, as with Sunbird, I can subscribe to a remote calendar on the Internet. There are some nice ones to be had at iCal Share. You can add Sri Lankan holidays to your calendar, if you like. In my case, I have upcoming astronomical events listed as well as DVD release dates, NOVA's schedule, et al.



I unthinkingly opted for the 64-bit version of Vista. While it thunks 32-bit apps just fine, I have a few 16-bit programs that are unable to run on the shiny new version of Windows. However, thanks to a handy little program called DOSBox, I was able to get one of my all-time favorite games to run - The Last Express.



TLE was released in 1997 and its lovely rotoscoped Art Nouveau graphics have aged well, in my opinion. Since I've got some other games that are older than dirt, I am looking at a VMWare solution so I can just run Windows 98 from Vista when I want to bust out some old skool g@m3z. I am hoping this will also allow me to finally try out the Connections game that didn't work on XP. You may remember the Connections TV show by James Burke which ran on the Discovery and Science channels. Burke would focus on some modern apparatus or method and then go back and demonstrate a series of interrelated events which led to the creation of the modern thingy. For instance, in one episode he showed how the rise of sheep farms in the Scottish Highlands during the 18th century led to the invention of the computer.





Also, I'd like to get Microsoft Art Gallery running again. It came out in 1994 after Microsoft realized that computers running its OS could do more than process words and crunch numbers in spreadsheets. This was the time of the multimedia CD-ROM craze when it was thought that every reference and educational need could (and probably should) be met by the computer. You could read e-books that contained supplementary material or listen to Beethoven's 9th as the score flashed by you after having read some knowledgeable commentary and saw some nice pictures. Voyager Company became known for quality titles including attempts at, for want of a better term, interactive computer art, by the likes of Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel. For instance, Gabriel's XPlora1 allowed you to remix "Digging in the Dirt" while the remixing activities on Eve are much more expansive.

These multimedia CD-ROMs died in the late 90s with the rise of the Internet. (Plus it's debatable as to just how fun it is to read a book on a desktop computer.) It's too bad, really. While there were many crappy titles which were hastily thrown together to cash in on the trend, there were also some really good ones. And, while the Internet contains all of the information on these discs, there seems to be precious few websites which actually present the material in the way they did.

Microsoft Art Gallery was a virtual tour of the collection of The National Gallery in London. In addition to viewing the art, one can read about the artists, movements in the art world, and get background info relating to the work. If you want to check out the art of Florence, you can. Or of a particular artist, time period, or subject matter. Notably, one cannot do this at The National Gallery's website itself. While the Net wins hands down on the quality of pictures available (MAG is limited to 640x480), you have to go to one site to see the photos, another to get something more than a cursory overview of the artist, and probably yet another site to get more background info on art movements, the times & places in which the artists lived, etc. Here, everything is in one spot and you can easily change how you go about viewing the collection.

I also hope to run Escher Interactive wherein I can see the man's work and create my own artistic spatial anomalies and a CD-ROM about Bach which allows one to compose in his style. My cunning plan is to compose a 7th Brandenburg Concerto.