Mojave

Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” is horribly misleading. Wil Shipley has some great thoughts on the matter: “The Mojave Experiment:” Bad Science, Bad Marketing.

I recently upgraded to Vista. I’ve avoided it like the plague since its initial release. I bought into a lot of the negative reviews, and they helped fuel my desire to stay away from Vista. But with a new laptop came the new OS and I figured I would give it a shot. After a couple of weeks of using it, I like it. It looks better than XP. I’ve found it to be more stable with the applications I use. I’ve found the OS to be more responsive (but I chalk that up to running it under better hardware). But it’s not without its problems.

I CAN HAZ SP1 PLZ? I tried upgrading my install of Windows Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate. I was told that I needed to upgrade to Vista Home Premium SP1 OR I’d have to reformat my laptop and install Vista Ultimate. I opted for the former. After downloading the 400+Mb manual install for SP1, I ran it. It processed for 15-20 minutes, restarted my system, and configured 3 stages of updates. After another reboot, I was able to log into my system only to find that SP1 did not install due to errors. My only option, now, is to do a fresh install of everything.

I CAN HAZ WIRELESS PLZ? I only had one hardware conflict: My D-LINK WBR-1310 wireless router wouldn’t work with my Dell Inspiron 1710 laptop. I could get the hard-wired connection to work fine, but nothing I tried worked. I ended up swapping routers with my mother-in-law – she had a pre-N D-LINK router – and it solved my problems. Everything else I had installed without any problems.

I’m sure, as I spend more time with Vista, I’ll find more things that bother me. I haven’t had enough problems with it yet to justify a downgrade, but that thought is looming in the back of my mind already. When I get some time, I’ll start from scratch on the laptop and get Ultimate on it. But for right now, I’ll deal with what I’ve got, which isn’t half bad at all.