No, not another weather-related entry. I thought I’d update everyone on my Vista experiences.
I got hold of a Corsair TurboFlash stick to try out the performce boost possible with Windows “ReadyBoost” and it does seem to work. My issue with it though is that Windows seems to forget what the stick is and warn about “unrecognized USB device” or some such rubbish after about two days of use. So I only tend to lob it in during gameplay.
I’m still scouring ebay.co.uk for a new TV card so that Media Center will work. It seems a bit silly as the PC sits in the study and I don’t watch TV on it except in a little window whilst doing something else but I would rather move to a card for which Windows has proper drivers instead of the “jsut about working” drivers we have with the WINTV card. I’m basically looking for something like the PVR-150 or one from this list.
Whilst playing Half-life2:episode 1, the sound was very choppy. I have already used ebay to source an Audigy 2 sound card to replace the SB Live5.1 that Vista had decided to demote and was curious that it might be that. The Creative forums though point to it being motherboard related. My motherboard is (don’t laugh) an Asus A7V333 which is basically a VIA Apollo Kt333/VT8233A chipset board supporting Athlons upto 2600. So I stuck in the latest VIA Hyperion all-in-one driver set and things improved a little. Come to think of it though, that is when the Corsair stick started playing up – but that could be coincidence.
But that isn’t all. It seems there is a quiet uproar in some corners that the nVidia drivers are a problem too. I switched to the beta drivers 101.41 and things improved again.
So needless to say that Vista is a stable platform let down by ropey driver support. I can’t blame Microsoft as my hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth. Hardware manufacturers such as Hauppauge deserve recognition for getting pretty much all the legacy hardware running. Others like Creative have used it as an opportunity to end-of-life a load of older stuff and you can’t blame them for that.
I did get thoroughly sick of Internet Explorer 7 and switched back to Firefox 2.Browsing the web was suddenly very quick and stable without loads of annoying warning boxes.
Creative have snuck out a very minor update to the sound card drivers so I’m off to load those up….
