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| Alienware PC |
Purty, ain't it? It's a monster, weighing in at about 60 lbs with dimensions of 25" deep, 19" tall, and 10" wide. Considering its size, when I was about to lift it up the stairs to my house's attic (our "game" room), I was psychologically preparing myself for a larger weight. Fortunately, the case is plastic, not metal, significantly reducing its weight from what it could have been. Still, I needed my twin brother to help me out, and unless I bulk up between now and the fall, I'll need help getting it into my college dorm room too. Based on a conversation we had the other day, I believe my friend, Mr. Miller, agreed to step up to the task in advance, albeit only if I let him try it out. I'm more than happy to accommodate him, because the alternative is that he'll incapacitate me and just take it. Actually, he might still do that...
With one major exception (that I'll come to in a minute, but you can probably guess it from this post's title), I'm thrilled with my new PC. Sure, I have to listen to my techie friends rib me with cries of "Dude, you got a Dell!", as Alienware was purchased in the last year or so by Dell, but it's worth it. I've tested it with two games: Supreme Commander (which came with the computer) and the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 multiplayer demo. I turned on the settings for both to their maximums at my monitor's resolution of 1680x1050, and I'm happy to report that they ran smoothly (thus, at least 30 fps) without any graphical glitches or anomalies. Both games looked gorgeous, and I can't wait to try out other games. I expect that some games in the near-future may really test my system (i.e. Crysis), but I should still be able to run them on high-range settings. I was paranoid that opting for one video card instead of two was a mistake, but the new Nvidia Geforce 8800-series cards are a quantum leap from the previous generation, chewing out current generation games and spitting them out without any difficulty. My PC came with a set of benchmarks that Alienware ran before shipping it to me, and its 3DMark 2006 score is recorded as 13,916, about 4000 points less than comparable SLI PCs I've seen reviewed but still overkill for anything out right now (I may independently verify that score at some point). It's a touch louder than I anticipated, as I paid extra for "acoustic dampening", but it's a steady hum generated by the PC's fans that fades into the background when I'm listening to music, and it doesn't seem to get worse when I play a game.
And now we come to the aforementioned exception: Vista is a disappointment. It's not buggy, per se; it's simply stupid. Essentially, Microsoft has given up on security. Instead of designing an OS that is inherently secure and resistant to malevolent software, Microsoft has shifted the burden to the user by asking him/her to approve virtually everything one's system does. For example, starting almost any program leads to a prompt asking you the approve the program's execution. And every time you try to execute that program, even if you've run the exact same program a million times, you will still get a prompt. With Unix-style OSes, there is a set-it-and-forget-it philosophy in the form of permissions; once you give a user authorization to execute a file, the user can always execute that file without the OS questioning it. That makes sense; Vista's approach doesn't. Even worse, the same treatment is applied to common tasks, like deleting a file (in which case, you have to approve the task twice: once to approve it and again to confirm that it should go to the Recycle Bin). Fortunately, there is a way to turn off this "feature" (called User Account Control) that I found with a Google search, but I can only imagine how the average user will react to it. Most users don't understand what their computers are doing most of the time, so I have to speculate that when they receive prompts like this, they will either learn to ignore them (defeating the whole purpose of the warnings, similar to the problem of the car alarm), disable them altogether (like I did, also rendering the "feature" null and void), or naively trust that Vista is trying to protect them and disapprove the request. In this latter case, users will be preventing their systems from being able to do anything useful, inevitably leading to frustration and frantic calls to Tech Support. No wonder so few people are adopting Vista.
The other barrier I encountered was transferring settings from my Windows XP PC to Windows Vista. Microsoft, in their infinite "wisdom" (notice all the quotation marks I'm using in this post?), rearranged their OS's filesystem again. In particular, instead of Documents and Settings, there's a User's folder. Not too bad so far; just a name change. Then, there are folders for each account on your computer, which is the same as in XP. But go into one of these folders, and you'll encounter another difference. Instead of My Documents, My Pictures, Application Data, etc., all of these folders have been renamed to Documents, Pictures, AppData, etc. To Microsoft's credit, the process is eased by folders that have the old names (i.e. My Documents) and link to the new names (i.e. Documents). But look inside AppData and you'll find more inconsistencies: there are three folders called Local, LocalLow, and Roaming. So where the heck do I put my application settings? There are more examples like this, and since I wasn't using the Transfer Files and Settings wizard to transfer files from my old computer to my new one (instead I was using my external hard drive, to which I had backed up all my important settings), I had to figure out the appropriate folders manually (I didn't trust the wizard to handle my files correctly). My methodology was to install an application, see where it created folders, and then put my old settings into those folders. Why can't Microsoft set a standard and stick to it? XP functioned relatively well, compared to their previous efforts, and I know that Vista was built off of it. Why did they feel the need to change their filesystem's organization? I have many more games to install, and I'm betting that I'll have to move some of my saved games around to get Vista to find them.
In terms of application incompatibilities, I've been pretty lucky. For most of my programs, either the XP version worked with Vista, or there was an upgrade available that made my program compatible with Vista. Thank goodness I didn't adopt Vista earlier than I did, because I know that Nvidia's drivers were wonky when Vista first came out; they seem to work fine now. But alas, I didn't have complete success: my Palm syncing software isn't fully functional. Until Palm releases a fix, I can't install any new software onto my Palm. On the bright side, I can still update my calendar, contacts, etc.
In terms of Vista's look and feel, I'm satisfied, but there's nothing that hasn't been done before, and I know that Ubuntu (which I'll be installing in a day or two) has even more visual tricks to it than Vista. Speaking of Ubuntu, I did run into issues in getting my PC ready to dual-boot. I thought it would be a matter of reinstalling Vista so that I could partition my hard drive, but I couldn't do that and then use my Alienware recovery disk. That disk restores my PC to its factory settings, meaning that it restores my hard drive to its original, single partition-self. As it turns out, there was a very simple solution: You can "shrink" a volume, which unformats part of a hard drive and opens that space up to be formatted into another partition, exactly what I was trying to do. Once again, I discovered this trick through Google (in fact, a whole step-by-step guide for dual-booting with Vista/Ubuntu) but only after 2 or 3 hours of tinkering around yesterday. I'm looking forward to playing around with Linux later this week.
While Vista has been frustrating, I'm reserving my final verdict until after another month or two of use. As long as it's stable and functional, I believe that it'll be at least as useful as XP, once I've gotten settled in and learned all the tips and tricks to it. Since my PC didn't come with a Vista manual, the latter may require more Google-ing, but I acquired my expertise in XP through experience, and I'm sure that Vista will prove no different. And if not, at least I'll have Linux as an alternative, although I know it'll have even more configuration issues than Vista did.
Oh, one more thing to mention that has nothing to do with the above: When I've gotten sick of spending time in the attic, I've gone downstairs to watch an episode or two of Battlestar Galactica on DVD. My mom stayed and watched a few episodes, and now, she regularly joins me to watch! I had no idea that she was a nerd at heart. ;-) Despite her constant questions, I patiently answer them, hoping to make a convert out of her yet. Time will tell. But that very same mother is kicking me out of the attic now. I've been spending most of the day configuring my system, so I suppose I'll have to wait until tomorrow to get significant playtime with it. Bye for now!
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