Well, it’s hard to believe but summer is almost over. Come next Thursday it will be back to the books for me. I had a nice start to the summer back in May with our trip to the Dominican, which was quite awesome. The weather here this summer hardly compared to how nice it was there. I told myself the reason for going away this year was because I didn’t know when I would have the chance to again. Now that I’ve gone once it is hard to think that I couldn’t find the time and money to do it again next year.

Ever since the week after I got back from the Dominican I’ve been working at my co-op position. It’s been incredibly nice having a job where I don’t have to work in the evenings or on the weekends. Being downtown by the waterfront also made it so much better. The best part is that it isn’t coming to an end quite yet. While my co-op now officially ends next Wednesday that have agreed to let me work there part time during the school year. I am pretty happy about it all.

In other news, I recently attempted a dual boot with Windows Vista and FreeBSD. The dual booting part worked fine for the most part. I ended up deciding to try to use KDE for the desktop environment which for most peoples standards worked fine as well. However, the trick with my setup is that I am attempting to have dual monitors working, in the same fashion as I have it working under Windows. Try as I might I just couldn’t figure it out. The biggest problem seemed to be that I am working with a 20″ widescreen LCD and a 17″ LCD. From my understanding there is a certain combined maximum resolution that will work and that I am exceeding it. I have not giving up yet though, I just need to perform some more research first.

Last weekend I finally bit the bullet and decided to install Vista. There were a couple of things that were bugging me about my system so I wanted to either reinstall XP or give Vista a shot. It’s been on my mind for awhile now that since I am in IT now I need to get much more familiar with it than the occasional tinkering.

Out of curiosity I kept a log of the Vista install process which took about 45 minutes from the time I inserted the DVD until I saw the desktop for the first time. There are just a few comments I have about the install process, the first being that when the setup launched for about three minutes all I had was the Vista background with a cursor, nothing else. This was a little confusing because I didn’t know what, if anything, was going on. Needless to say the install was quite different from XP, but I liked it. There seemed to be a few instances where nothing appeared to be going on for a few minutes. One good example is when setup started expanding files. For a good 5-10 minutes it was showing 0% until after 10 minutes it was showing 75%. Another thing that stood out is that I was able to see an option to upgrade from XP to Vista but I was not able to select it, and believe was told it was not available. Mind you, I wasn’t interested in doing an upgrade, but I can pass this off on the version I am using.

After the install completed the only real issue I noticed immediately was lack of sound. I have built-in sound on my motherboard as well as a sound card that I use. There seems to be a number of people that have had issues with Creative sound cards after installing Vista, although it usually just requires installing a new driver. While trying to resolve the issue I encountered my first BSOD in Vista, but I did manage to get it working. I am hoping that will be the only blue screen I have to see. One other issue that appeared and that I am not 100% sure is gone is that after rebooting the boot process would seem to halt and I would be left with a blank screen. Usually after another reboot or two it was fine. My current thoughts on this are it was a result of the driver issue for the sound card, or it is somehow seeing the old XP install (in a Windows.old folder) and getting confused. I tend to keep my computer on so I will have to watch out for this the next time I reboot.

So, my thoughts on Vista. I have been just as guilty as most at making fun of Vista for as long as I can remember now, but I have to say that so far I am happy with it. I have to admit I am a bit of a sucker for the eye candy though. The primary purpose should be functionality but pretty is always nice too. I do have Aero enabled and my system is working just as good, if not better, then before the switch. For those of you familiar with it my computer scored a base score of 2.8 on the Windows Experience Index, obviously room for improvement but I’m not going to rush out and purchase another video card for a higher score. Overall I don’t have any complaints so far but it hasn’t even been a week yet.

(Note: For those curious, I am running Vista Business with SP1)