smart computer use?

I haven’t really noticed anything at all since installing the service pack 1 for Vista that was released very recently. I think it came out within the last couple days. I still need to use the machine a little more, probably, before I’ll start to notice anything different. I hope that all of my applications still work. I’m not too worried about it.

From Heise Online:

SP1 does not perform any fundamental upgrades, but rather it mainly fixes faults and problems. Once the update is complete, Vista is supposed to be faster at copying and unpacking files and the user account manager will not require so many confirmations. Microsoft provides an overview of the updates in Service Pack 1 in a white paper.

I’m hoping that maybe service pack 1 for Windows Vista will help smooth out some of the file copying issues I’ve been having. These particular issues are annoying, and if they are fixed, then that’s great. I’ll be happy. I’ll probably not jump for joy, but I’ll be happy.

There has been a general opinion that people should wait for Vista Service Pack 1 before even considering upgrading to the Vista operating system.

Looks like now is the time to upgrade. At least that is true according to some of the people making predictions. Will Vista finally attain a level of status where the general consensus is to upgrade to Vista?

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Once again, trying to install some plugins on a web site.

Here’s a great screenshot of Vista’s file copying glory. I’m simply trying to copy a folder of files to the desktop. The folder, as you can see, is not exactly a feat of file size.

I’m just getting done writing this post, taking and editing the screenshot, and proofing it for posting, and there’s still 40 seconds remaining on the file copy operation. I also went and got the power charger and plugged in my laptop.

I do see that there is a large amount of files. Could this be what is hanging up Vista?

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I’ve been using Windows Vista for a couple months on a laptop. This has been my first experience with Vista. I have been pretty happy with the operating system overall, but there is one nagging thing I repeatedly get annoyed with.

Windows Vista, at least on my laptop machine, can’t copy or move files at a fast rate in many instances. I frequently have to wait 5-10 minutes to extract the files from an approximately 100k zip file or similar. That is pretty rediculous. I’m actually typing this as I wait for a some files to copy for a web site installation, and it’s taking way to long for that copy to execute.

I’ve been able to find information about turning off certain indexing services on Vista to speed up this kinda stuff. I had a problem with not being able to copy files from an XP machine over a network to this Vista machine when I first got this laptop. I did some research on Google and found that some people were eliminating this issue by disabling some indexing services on their macine. I tried it and it worked, but only for the network transfers. It didn’t fix my local file moving and copying issues. The local file system operations are still way to slow for my liking.

Here’s a quote from a related forum thread, kinda funny.

It’s quicker to copy stuff to a USB pen drive and walk between the machines! As with the guy above, I can get 500kb/s+ downloading from the Internet, so what’s with Vista copying?

Good stuff. There’s tons of stuff out there on the Internet similar to this.

After this 12.5 minute unzipping process of a 100k file ends I’ll probably not try this again tonight. I’m going to probably just call it quits and go to the office tomorrow to use my XP machine to install my plugins and finish the web site installation. It’s so much faster.

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Alright. Here’s a classic tale of computing.

Approximately 38 minutes ago I grabbed the laptop (the one I’m using right now), flipped it open, and thought to myself “hey, I should email that Doom rickroller video to some people right now”. How I came to this thought is a much longer and different story. I’ll leave it for a different time. If you are wondering what a rickroller is, check this out. I found the whole rickroller thing to be pretty amusing.

Back to this story.

I opened up Firefox. All my tabs were reloaded from the night before, including the tab with the Doom rickroller video from youtube. I then opened up gmail and started to compose a message.

Upon hitting ctrl+v to paste the rickroller video link into the message field, Firefox just pretty much froze up. Weird. I waited minute just in case it was a javascript thing or something. No go. I then tried to close Firefox. No go.

This laptop, although dependable and pretty nice, can get kinda flaky when it’s left on and goes in and out of hibernation a lot over an extended period of time. Being the somewhat impatient and reckless computer user that I can be sometimes, I just held down the power button and killed the machine.

Upon restart, the machine crashed and rebooted. I was asked politely by Vista to go into a startup repair mode. Okay. Sounds good. I’ve never seen this before but it sounds like a good idea. I ran startup repair. The machine sat and thought, using a load bar to show me that it was thinking about something. Then it prompted me to run system restore.

No way. I didn’t want to run that. I had just installed Propellerheads Reason 4, and didn’t feel like needing to reinstall Reason if the system restore rolled back too far. I hit Cancel.

Now, you might be thinking I’m an idiot. Truth is, sometimes I just don’t care if my computers crash. I should maybe be more concerned.

I then had to sit and wait for about 20 minutes while my machine completed the startup repair operation. I had no idea how long it was going to take until it ended.

All I wanted to do was email the rickroller video link. That was just too much to ask.

Anyways, after the repair completed and shut down, I started the computer and decided to type this. Good stuff I guess.

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