Well, I have had a handful of bad experiences with Microsoft lately. I just recieved a new (pretty darn cool!) motherboard for Christmas; I plan on installing OSX with it, but first I decided to install some flavour of Windows first so I can do some hard drive operations to prepare for OSX. So the first thing I did was try to install Windows XP. No go, it doesn’t recognize the new hardware I have (no EIDE support). Well, I don’t have any floppy disks to install the drivers with, so I figured I’d just go to Vista now and try it out. After I finally found a working torrent, I installed it expecting Microsoft’s new operating system to behave a bit more like OSX and not worry about drivers.

Boy was I wrong!

I booted up and many things didn’t work. I was stuck at 800×600, I had no Aero Glass, I had no sound, and it was painfully slow! Way to go Vista! Looks like we’ll have to wait for the next release of Windows to see pain-free installation. So I started to fish around for drivers, using IE7 which came with Vista. I kept using the built in search feature to look around for a video driver, I couldn’t find a single page about NVidia Vista drivers. I was getting worried, but then I realized, I’M USING WINDOWS LIVE. So I searched Google instead and the 3RD RESULT was exactly what I was looking for. Way to go again, Microsoft. So after I finally fished around for my video card drivers and mysteriously enabled Aero Glass, then downloaded the (beta) sound drivers, I had a working system… kinda. I think it’s my RAM, I’m not sure, but Vista still seems sluggish. I mean, the glass effects are running fine (although making me a bit nauseous after a while), it’s just sluggish. So I thought while I’m waiting for OSX86 to finish, I’ll try to install Steam. It installed alright, and I got all of my games in a jiffy, started up HL2 Episode 1 to play around. It took FIVE MINUTES just to get to the “New Game, Load Game” screen. I was pulling my hair out by now, noticing that obviously something is wrong. After another ten minutes or so, I was finally in the game, except it was lagging horribly, unplayable. There were graphic artifacts all over the place, glitches every frame.

Bah! Well, I’m sure I’ll fix it eventually, but it really irks me that the newest version of Windows (RTM, mind you) still can’t compete with the simplicity and “just works” feeling of Mac OS X, and I’m left with so many more problems.