Friday, May 18, 2007

Aaargh - I hate computers

I've been playing about with a few new operating systems at home. Namely Windows Vista Home Premium, Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn), Debian (Sarge and Etch) and I've come to the conclusion that things are getting harder and harder with regards to driver support.

Either hardware is too old (re my webcam and Vista) or just not supported (Creative X-fi soundcard and Ubuntu), or sata drives aren't supported without fiddling about with floppy disk (most of the pc's I have do not have now) or slipstreaming the drivers onto the disc(re XP etc). Bring back the Commodore64, I don't mind having to turn the cassette tape over halfway through install or even having to rewind and start again at the read error, it had an OS that worked!

Ok so the pc isn't exactly your standard run of the mill, it's a real mix of old and new, [AMD Opteron 265 processor, Compro Video dual tv-tuner card, Creative X-fi soundcard, Nvidia 7600GT graphics etc... all in a nice Silverstone HTPC case] all I want to do is make a decent media pc so that we can record and watch tv, dvd's etc.

Ok I know the scope of drivers required is getting larger all the time, but come on. I'd really like Creative to pull their finger out and get some Linux drivers out for their range of soundcards (not even new been around for at least a year or more). Then I could use the Vista on my other pc so as to take advantage of future DirectX10 capabilities in games etc.

All I want is everything and now, is this so bad.


I suppose whilst I'm at the install stage I might aswell have a look at the copy of Longhorn provided the download completed.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

I want one

This is going to the top of my Christmas wishlist