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I know a lot about computers, and last week on one of my spare hard disks I did an upgrade from XP to Vista.

It would not let me do a "upgrade migrate" because some of the software I had (like Nero 6) does not work on Vista, so it just cancelled the upgrade, I had no option.

So I did an "upgrade new install" which means you lose all your settings.

The new install went OK, but it could not find any Vista drivers for my sound card (this PC is only about 15 months old).

I have hunted the web and cannot find a Vista drivers for my sound card.

So I now have a "working" Vista with no sound.

I WOULD SAY IF YOU HAVE A WORKING XP DO NOT UPGRADE TO VISTA.

One other thing.

On previous versions of Windows, if you had a Windows upgrade CD, and you were instaling to an empty hard disk, you could just insert the "old" Windows CD at the appropriate point and it would let the upgrade continue.

This does not work on Vista.

The Vista upgrade CD will ONLY work if you already have the "old" version of Windows installed, and you start the upgrade CD from there.

So if you have an empty hard disk, and a Vista upgrade CD, you have to install XP first (or some other old version of Windows), and THEN start the Vista upgrade.

Badly installed? BADLY INSTALLED!!!!???

HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, it was crap. You're the only person I know that's thought Win98 was more stable than XP, regardless of hardware.

My brain refuses to except any logic from a FAT32 file system to be more stable than a NTFS one.

My brains not havin it I tell ya!

Boring explanation of why XP was more reliable than 98.

Over the years Microsoft have had two development paths for Windows and the products families were different.

One path went Windows 1.0, 2.0 etc, Windows 95, then 98, then ME. Then it stopped.

These versions were basically built on top of DOS with a pretty front end. One badly behaved application could bring down Windows because DOS was not able to cope.

The other path (which started out for Servers) went Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003 (for Servers).

This was a far more robust platform and NOT built on top of DOS. Each application runs in a protected mode, so if it crashes it only brings itself down and not all of Windows.

Vista is built on top of the XP / 2003 code base, but with MAJOR rewrites in certain areas, which is why an upgrade from XP to Vista is NOT likely to be an easy job.

So now you know.

FAT32 is no good for big files, for that you need NTFS.

But argueing about OS's is like arguing whether a pencil is better than a pen.

You pick the right tool for the right job.

The single biggest issue with Vista is the DRM and kow tow to Hollywood coupled with the 'tilt-bits' detection - it's a big fuck off from me.

You might have a legally bought HD-DVD but you find playback is VGA because Vista detected a "tilt-bit" fluctuation it therefore deems it as unsecure or a pirate disc or a dos attack.....

PC voltages are not stable and do fluctuate, Vista detects there and deems them insecure and sticks two fingers up at your legal content.

And one your file has been deemed ilegal, there is no going back.

You are frankly quite mad to put this on your PC.

>Disney apparently stole the Mickey Mouse character from somebody

Not true. The story was as follows

Early on Disney worked for studio and came up with a character a BIT like Mickey Mouse, called Oswald Rabbit.

Eventually he found that someone had bought the studio out and he lost the right to use the Oswald Rabbit character.

So he changed him to a mouse, called him Mickey, and the rest is history.

Here is a picture of them side by side, Mickey on the right.



More about Disney, including section on Oswald.

Agree 100%.

This laptop (P3 800Mhz) I use mainly for internet (and the previous one) and until recently my desktop PC (P4 2GHz) were exclusively running Win98 Second Edition with all the updates from Microsoft website and I can count the number of freezes / blue screen of death in 6+ years on one hand. Prior to that Win 95 equally stable too.

A few months ago I made desktop dual boot Win XP pro SP2 (NTFS partition) with all the updates and downloaded drivers together with Win98SE as I need to occasionally still run DOS programs.
Had several crashes / freezes with XP already!!

Main reason for going to XP was FAT32 4GB file limit which is less than a 4.7GB DVD when converted to a single MPEG2 file for editing.

As they found at work recently after a problem NTFS far harder to extract / recover files from than FAT32.

From what I'm reading so far I have no interest in Vista.