Please Steve Bellend aka Monkey Dancer, keep your grubby mits off our Flickr.

The moment I have to log in with a Passport/Windows Live password is the moment I jump ship to zoomr.  Is it zoomr?

Wonder if you can delete flickr accounts and get some money back from the pro membership?  Doubt it.

Far be it from me to write something but.

When I said that my XBox 360 has recovered from its bout of ring of deathiness I spoke too soon. The next day the 3 red flashing lights re-appeared and this time it was permanent.

Thankfully the XBox repair site worked this time and it was pretty easy to instigate a repair. Thing is, you get sod all instructions. They send you an email with one of those address labels with bar codes and what not all over it (no idea what you do if you haven’t a printer) and information on finding a UPS depot (or the number to arrange a pick up). They give no information at all regarding packaging.

Turns out that unlike in the USA microsoft don’t provide a shipping parcel for fucked XBoxes in the UK. I had to trowl the XBox forums to work out what I was supposed to do. It’s ridiculous, there are tons of people on there confused about whether or not to wait for a box to put it in, including some who had waited weeks for nothing.

Microsoft also don’t tell you whether or not you’re supposed to send the whole kit or just the main unit, the forum people’s consensus is that you should send just the unit and even keep the hard drive. So that’s what I’ve done.

Dropped the package at the UPS depot rather than be stuck listening for the door for a pick up dude.  Took an age to figure out how to get into the business park.  Crazy place.

Anyway, does anyone read this blog?

Today I came back from walking eddie, all in a mood for a bit of forza when I had a nasty surprise.

Hey, it’s everyone’s favorite console friend, the ring of death. I was fuming! I really was cursing microsoft for being such a bunch of engineering cowboys.

Went to the xbox site to request a repair, had to register my xbox first (you’d think using it on xbox live would give them a clue), entering serial numbers is always fun, sigh. Anyway, got to the repair part and was given an almighty agreement to, well, agree to. Well I agreed as best I could but the xbox site was having none of it, threw an error in my face and told me to sod off to a phone.

At this stage I was ready to launch a boycott microsoft site, just ‘cos they are so shite at everything they do. Took a photo of the rings to email everyone I play with on there.

After all that, I tried the console once more just in case. Hey it worked! Soooo relieved, I had the impression that the moment you get the 3 red rings your xbox was toast. I guess it’s not quite so straight forward.

They can’t even get the 3 red rings right.

What do you think about this Harry?  Windows Vista RC1 (the proper RC1) is downloadable to all and sundry at this RC1 Download page.

Supposedly only technet, msdn and CPP members have access to it, but as it turns out if you were one of the many who downloaded Beta 2 and received a key for Beta 2 you can use that same key to install and activate RC1.

And the good news is that it works with boot camp now, people have moaned that the Mac Driver CD that you burn doesn’t work but I haven’t even needed it, Vista seems to have all the drivers in place anyway, must be just things like the iSight and what-not that doesn’t work but thats not going to hurt much.

You know what, it does seem really fast somehow, in some ways faster than OS X, though I wager that it’ll start to slow up once you’ve installed all yer junk and have been using it for a few months, like windows always does.

To be honest though, I can’t really say whether or not I like it because I don’t believe you can judge an OS until you have all your stuff on it, access to all your files and have lived in it proper, when it’s full of all your photo’s and music and stuff.  One thing I’ll say about the design though, it kind of feels cold, they’ve added a very slight hint of blue tint to the transparent glass theme and it’s all very icy.

It does this optimizing thing now when it boots for the first time and it takes an absolute age so they’re showing some stupid Microsoft style marketing spiel whilst it does it, it’s the same crap you used to get during the install of previous versions of windows and I was kinda hoping they wouldn’t bring them back, particularly because they always end up look more and more hilarious as the OS ages.  It’s things like “The most secure version of windows ever”, and “Get your work done faster”.  I don’t understand the point of advertising the thing to you when you’ve obviously already got it because you’re looking at it.

I’m having a slow brain week again. From Engadget

Windows Starter 2007 – Vista without Aero, probably meant for developing nations.

Windows Vista Home Basic – Basic Windows Vista for your single PC fam, doesn’t sound like much going on here. Analagous to XP Home.

Windows Vista Home Basic N – European version of the same, but without Media Player (because of antitrust rulings against MS in the EU).

Windows Vista Home Premium – This is the one we’re all probably gonna own. It’s got Media Center functionality, Cable Card support, the whole home-media shebang.

Windows Vista Business – Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista.

Windows Vista Business N – Think of it as XP Pro, but Vista, but Euro.

Windows Vista Enterprise – Business version of Vista with numerous enterprise features, like Virtual PC, volume encryption, etc.

Windows Vista Ultimate – Love that name. This one does all of the above (and more); what else do you need to know? It’s ultimate Windows..

What a confusing mess. What I want to know is, which is the one for developers? Which is the one you have to get if you need a IIS server for asp.net testing? Anyone? Or maybe they will do the right thing and make the web server functionality free like with every single other OS on the planet.

I was bored so I installed a copy of vista build 5270 (yeah? what? I don’t care) and I cannot say that it was a pleasant experience. I must be getting old, I used to love trying out beta OSs but now it’s just hell of earth. Never again. Vista experience summed up in bullets.

• OK, started with the install. You still need a stupid RAID/SATA floppy to provide the installer with a driver, there’s a whole DVD half empty, why the hell can’t they provide all the SATA drivers? There can’t be that many? Ubuntu manages it. It’s a nuisance because I don’t keep my floppy drive wired up inside… I mean, whats the point these days? So I have to connect it all up just to install windows.
• Wasn’t this release supposed to have a super fast installer using some new fang-led technique? Well, it took freaking hours. It was largly unattended though, so I guess that’s a plus?
• It took me straight into the super cool graphic mode with transparent everything. However, I was a tad disappointed with speed. Some things were nice and fluid, windows appear on the screen in quite a tasty manor, they zoom towards you a teensy weensy bit all whilst fading. It’s effective. But, the usual test of dragging windows around the screen is a bit on the jerky side. I have a 6600GT with 128MB so I figured it would be able to do quite a decent job. This is in 1600×1200, which shouldn’t be too tricky in this day and age. I hope nVidia have still a lot of optimising to do.
• I occasionally saw corruption on the screen. Black lines appearing over the top of firefox’s toolbar was a common one.
• There’s a severe shortage of compatible drivers. And even vista drivers seem to refuse to install. I couldn’t get the beta of creative’s sound blaster driver to install at all. I had to use the KX Project driver, which despite working kept throwing errors.
• Almost all the software I use on a regular basis had issues. Nero wouldn’t install at all. Video apps have a huge problem with the graphic system, you can set apps up to trigger the new graphic system to turn off when they run, but even then the only video app which worked properly was VLC. Others were stuck with software rendering… blocky with lots of sheering. And windvd, if you enabled hardware acceleration would crash and you couldn’t load it again. Nice.
• WinDVD was unable to provide Media Player with DVD functionality. I then noticed that it was supposed to be able to play DVD’s straight off this time, albeit with a free software update from microsoft. But, windows update told me there were no more updates to install. So I was left scratching my head.
• It moans at you even more than XP! It keep popping up messages for every teensy little nuisense thing. Things like No virus checker (even though it has that defender thing built in). Oh and it kept suggesting that there was a problem with my hardware! The cheek! It got me to do a long drawn out memory test the next boot, and despite my machine passing it with flying colours it kept nagging me to do it again. Jerk.
• This might be a me thing rather than a Vista issue, but I found the sheer number of changes they’ve made to it to be quite daunting, even for a person who’s used PC’s as long as I have. Especially to explorer (the folders and files viewer I mean) and control panel, and display properties and all that gubbins. A lot of the changes seem a tad unnecessary too. And sometimes the organisation is untidy, especially control panel where it feels as if microsoft aren’t quite sure where to put things. They have to make a great deal of use of the sidebar panel to give shortcuts to other options because they don’t know where to categorise them.

So in the end vista stayed on my machine for less than a day because it keep making me cry. If this is the sign of things to come, all these driver and software incompatibilities it will probably be at least a year after vista’s release before I’d have a smooth ride with it.

Any no more being a guinea pig.