Mahatma Ghandi never had this trouble

I was determined not to succumb and install vista beta 2 because, well its pretty pointless isn’t it? Unfortunately I was bored yesterday and when I’m bored I do stupid things; like wrestling spiders and devising heinous plans for world domination. Turns out that installing vista on an intel mac isn’t a walk in the park, unless its a park with lots of pitfalls. The NT OS loader whatsit moaned at me about some shit after the installation routine rebooted. After having 2 failed installs and getting pissed off, but whilst thinking that I’ve got this far I’m not giving up now. I discovered some tips that suggested deleting a mysterious 200MB partition that mactels have, its affectionately called, by some people in the know; the EFI Partition. Once the 200MB partition is deleted, and you go and install vista again and reboot it works straight off, hurray! Also surprisingly vista on my iMac booted straight into eye candy mode. I expected to have to go to lots of trouble with video drivers.

I still can’t work out what the EFI Partition actually does, from what I can gather the repercussions for deleting it is that you cannot roll back the boot camp installation (I guess it had stored the boot camp install logs on there) and also you probably won’t be able to install firmware upgrades (I guess it stores the temporary upgrade data on there for when it reboots and installs it) so hopefully Apple won’t be releasing any more firmware upgrades anytime soon.

Strange side effect, now when I don’t hold option, allowing it to boot straight into Mac OS X the first thing you see is a peculiar folder icon with a question mark in the middle, this stays on the screen for only a split second before the Apple logo replaces it and it then carries on booting as normal. Seeing the strange icon appear is very disconcerting.

Second reason for regretting installing this stupid OS is the elder scrolls: oblIVion. Which i had been led to believe works flawlessly on vista. Well, in one way it does, but I have a major problem. When I played it on XP it, like all PC games allowed me to choose the resolution. But on Vista oblivion for some reason only offers me the option of running it in the displays native resolution. 1680×1050 is a very high resolution for such a demanding game and it’s way too jerky to play. It would be just as jerky in XP had I played it at such a high res. So that is very annoying indeed.

Finished Half Life: Episode One the other day. I couldn’t recommend that game enough, it’s an absolute bargain at 20 dollars, you still get quite a substantial game. And the last few hours of play are soooo freaking exciting! Very very impressed.