you say hello and I say goodbye!

Well after running windows Vista ultimate for roughly a year now I doing something that is becoming less and less uncommon. Thats right im downgrading (upgrading if you ask me) back to Windows XP. Why am I doing this. Let me sum up a few reasons.

My machines is pretty beefy with an intel pentium D proc and over 3 gigs of ram. I have a nice video card. Dual 17" displays two optical drives ( a cd burner and a dvd burner). And its current age is 2 years old. SO its no slouch and in genreal. However....

compared to an xp machine with lower specs or both proc and ram it takes me over a minute longer to boot than a lesser xp machine.

1.) I am using over 2 gigs of ram most of the time and am having issues with not enough free RAM

2.) My hard drive has become bloated to the point where I only have 2.5 gigs free of space. Vista seems to consume my hdd. just last week I cleared out a lot of stuff that I no longer needed and some stuff that I would have liked to keep but decided it was not critical and could be replaced. This got me to around 14-16 gigs of free space. Well now in the space of a week im back down to 2.5. When I search my drive I can find nothing that should be consuming this space. And when I went through my computer and backed up the files I wanted to keep including all my media I was only at around 17 gigs? SO where is the other 60?????

3.) Microsoft programs often crash while using Vista. This includes IE7 office 2007, even notepad crashed on me this morning. FREAKING NOTEPAD?????

4.) Vista ultimate is the biggest piece of skank ware I have seen yet. (if you dont know what skank ware is look for my wiki on it coming soon!!) I cant believe they charge more for this version. The only usable extra I have seen from it that I tried out was a crappy little texas hold em game. Thats it. Windows dream scene, which I did not plan to use but was excited to see, wont run on a dual monitor system like mine. there goes another feature. Oh and Aero often randomly turns itself off.

5.) programs hang all the time. ALL THE TIME.

6.) The sidebar is perhaps THE most pathetic attempt at copying something from apple. Their are like no real usable gadgets and they dont work as well as widgets do.

7.) It takes forever to do anything. I was trying to edit a photo awhile back and my machine kept crashing while doing a more complex editing option. Well after spending an hour trying I got fed up and decided to try it on my laptop. Ok if you have not seen my laptop its a mobile centrino proc with 512 of ram. it literally took me 30 seconds start to finish to do the edit I was trying to do!!!

8.) The security features serve only one purpose. ANNOYANCE! I only ever saw false positives from all the built in agents and the only person they stopped from accessing my machine was me.

9.) the last straw. today I was trying to upgrade to the newest version of Anti-Virus I have and it took me over an hour to uninstall the old version. Then it took a couple of re-boots before I could install the new ver. All in all took me about 1.5 hours to do. Brian in the next cube over. Same thing 5 minutes.

I am officially disgusted by this piece of garbage that Microsoft released.

Portal is the ROCKAGE!

Ok so I was talking to a couple of friends and had mentioned letting them borrow the orange box but before I could let it go for a small period of time I had to give portal a try. I have to say that this little concept game is one of the best games I have played in years. The aperture portal gun is simply brilliant and the physics behind the game are flawless. Any game that takes you a good couple of levels to really get your mind around what the heck you are actually doing, and not because of poor design, but because the concept is so new and fresh, is just so awesome. The levels are so well done and they scale in difficulty brilliantly. By the last couple of levels I could come up with a concept of what I would have to do pretty quickly but then the idea of "how the heck am I gonna pull that off" comes into play and makes each level a great challenge. I think whats also great about portal is that although it is totally linear, b/c of the portal system many levels have a number of different ways of reaching the goal. After beating Portal I went online and started to watch vids of how other people played levels and was really surprised at how different they were from my experience. Some did better others did worse but we all got through it. Other areas of note. The narration makes the game what it is. I wont go into too much details but this game has replaced my all time favorite line from a video game. Before this it was from the second nights of the old republic. There is a scene where you meet a new jedi named jolie and in the course of the conversation you have the option of saying "I hate you old man" to him. That used to be my favorite line. Now replaced with "oh come on we had fun didnt we? Like that time you thought I was going to murder you in the fire - that was fun right?"

SO anyway if you have a 360 you need to buy the orange box. Not only is it the best deal in video game history - 5 games for $60 bucks but it includes portal. Did I mention portal rocks. If you dont feel like you can put out the coin for the game then at least go rent it. Portal takes about 4-5 hours on your first play through so its easy to get through with a rental.

BTW -- Portal rocks!

Cheers!