A PC for Me
It’s kinda ridiculous but my wife and I own 1 MacBook, 1 iMac, 2 iphones, all consoles, and a PC. Most of my career was as a PC gamer. Starting in 1998 I worked for PCGamer, CGW, Strategy Plus, and a bunch of others that fell victim to HD console graphics. I loved my PCs and PC games but I always needed help. I’m not a tinkerer, I don’t like dip-switches, I couldn’t care less about the innards of my machine. Gimmie a good videocard, good sound card (this was a while ago) and tell me what game you want reviewed. . .
5 years ago with GamerDad I had to put the PC games aside in favor of console games and kid stuff. Then my PC died. And then the replacement part died. Then I cursed NewEgg and I bought a Mac. I then went 3 years without a single blip or glitch. I finally bought an Alienware gaming machine for my newly built office and while I’ve come to like the Mac presentation and navigation more, it was nice going home again. Then guess what happened . . .
Netsky32 or something like it. Malware, trojan, this thing spat out hundreds of viruses like a smashed ant hill and slowly but surely the mighty Alienware fell to its knees. Why didn’t I use antivirus or spy software?(No email or personal info on this PC btw) I did, and I caught it anyway, and the first thing this thing likes to do is sever your connection for updates. Seriously, I could go online, I could play Left 4 Dead, I could download files but if I tried to hit Windows Update or update any other program it simply would not do it.
I suffered with the problem for a while. Left 4 Dead worked and my Macs were running fine. Why spend the Christmas season searching your unbelievably messy basement storage area – which is the last place my Alienware recovery disc and spare XP were seen. Long story, basically when you have an office built AND you’re recovering from a heart attack and still a little off-kilter, it’s amazing what you can lose.
I knew a copy of XP would fix the problem via a reinstall, recovery, or clean wipe and install. But I didn’t want to buy XP again. Then Christmas came and my mom gave me $200 and . . . Vista is near that price. Why not solve the problem AND upgrade? Yeah, I know, with my history of bad compu-luck it isn’t very smart of me to buy the OS with the worst reputation in the business.
You know what? I like Vista. Sure I’m mainly using CLASSIC view (can’t find anything otherwise) but it’s nice to see and work with Windows with that Mac sheen and flow I’d come to like. It’s a huge improvement and more stable than Alienware’s custom XP. Even a game I downloaded from Steam, Call of Juarez, that failed to run in XP runs just fine on Vista.
So, thanks Mom!
January 10th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Vista FTW!
I really like Vista and I very rarely have any troubles with it. It doesn’t crash, it looks good, and DirectX 10 for gaming.
I’m glad it’s working out well for you too.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am
You’re behind the times Bub, all the cool kids are using Windows 7 now 😉
I just installed the beta as my primary OS. Crazy I know, but I started using Vista as my primary OS when that had its first public prerelease too. I like Vista, so 7 being a streamlined Vista is very nice for me.
You’re crazy for using Classic view in Vista though. It’s a horrible mess of the old and the new.
January 10th, 2009 at 11:50 am
I had a similar virus on my computer a couple weeks ago. I mean, my pc isn’t anything fancy (can’t play anything remotely 3D really) but yeah, it was really annoying. The virus slowed down my pc, opened up random ads all the time, and like yours stopped windows updates. I tried about 4 antivirus programs (mcafee, norton, defender, and onecare). What ended up working is my dad found it in the reg, removed it that way and then we scanned again with onecare and that managed to get rid of it (it wouldn’t before). It helps having a dad that actually does (well, did, but w/e) that for a living.
January 12th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I’m sure at this point Vista is far more stable than it started out and if a new pc came with it – I’d at least give it a try. I still have yet to make the jump and unlike your situation (thankfully) I have nothing forcing me to do so yet.
I have been looking at what’s happening with Windows 7 though…
January 12th, 2009 at 9:17 am
I tried Vista a few times.
The endless security prompts are super annoying.
And the whole thing is terribly organized.
OS/X is much more better in nearly every area imo. And it looks much better as well.
So I don’t miss anything about Windows except maybe pcgaming. And these days that is even questionable.
January 12th, 2009 at 9:37 am
I am back on XP at this point … the modest gain of DX 10 compared to, well, pretty much everything else … just not worth it.
January 12th, 2009 at 10:06 am
“Allow, allow,allow,allow” Vista in a nutshell. Its not as bad as I thought, but those allow things are annoying! Well, i just got Mirrors edge for 360, and i’m returning it for Prince Of Persia. Not my type of game, but good for a weeks rent.
January 12th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I got Windows 7 running on a boot camp partition on my MacBook (2 GHz unibody). Couldn’t run better, except I got bluescreened. I’m serious, it’s my second day with it, I was installing UT3, and I got bluescreened.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Vista has it’s pros and cons. It looks great, has lot’s of nifty features, and supports DX10. Performance wise I would say it is on par with XP and it is more secure. All that said I still use XP on 3 of my 4 machines. Vista is only on my gaming rig. Though, if you are building a machine that you want to last 2-3yrs you should go with Vista, not XP, for a few reasons.
For starters, developers are going to start taking advantage of features of Vista such as the improved UI, multi-tasking, and DX10. Drivers are finally stable for everything, including nVidia cards. It is more secure out of the box, so you probably wouldn’t have gotten whatever malware you did get. MS is eventually going to cut off XP support. And finally, the upgrade from Vista to Win7 should be pretty seamless since Windows 7 is like a beefed up SP for Vista.
If you don’t mind using a beta OS, I would go with Windows 7 and skip Vista, but if this is your primary PC in the house I wouldn’t risk it. I haven’t loaded up Win7 yet, I need to pull myself away from Sacred 2 long enough to do it, but I know plenty of people who have and say it is pretty stable and describe it as the OS that Vista should have been.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
To be fair, there are only two occasions when you should be seeing UAC prompts (you know, the annoying “Windows needs your permission to continue” dialogs).
The first case is when you are installing software. This is because in Vista, the “Program Files” directory on your system drive is now a protected directory. Normal users don’t have the ability to write files there. The downside of this is that, when you first start using Vista, and you’re installing all your applications, you’ll see these dialogs all the time. This gives a poor initial experience, I admit. But, as you get things set up the way you like, you should see them less and less during normal usage. And if they really bother you that much, it’s pretty easy to disable UAC.
The only other time you’ll see UAC dialogs under normal conditions is if you’re running software that is doing things it shouldn’t be doing. Writing to areas of the file system or registry that are protected under Vista are the most common cause. You see this a lot in poorly written freeware/shareware apps. In XP and earlier versions of Windows, these apps would simply fail to run if you tried to start them without admin privileges.
Any time you see a UAC dialog when you aren’t starting up a trusted program, that’s a sign that something bad is happening, and you should not allow it.