Windows Vista Sucks Less

I have been very critical over the last couple of years of Microsoft Windows Vista. It took them 5 years to get XP really ironed out into a nice operating system, just to kill it with Vista. My first several experiences with Vista lasted a few weeks each, before reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling XP in disgust. Vista was slow, everything was in a different place, and finding stuff even for an experienced computer user was frustrating. Video drivers were bad, printer drivers impossible to find, and most of my software, even from Microsoft, either did not work on Vista or had some other "issues". I short, Vista was a piece of shit.

When I started working for workflow.com last September, Vista was thrust upon me. At least during my working hours (which is most of the time) I used Vista Business on a decked out MacBook Pro. I appreciate the irony in the fact that the best notebook computer to run Vista is a Mac, and to my surprise, Vista runs pretty darn good on it! Not as fast as XP, but it was prettier and usable. Had this been my personal computer, I would have installed XP, but since I had to use Vista, well, I had to use Vista.

I'm not sure at what point I really started liking Vista, but I did. Several months ago, just for giggles, I installed Vista Ultimate on my home server. I wanted to test out Windows Media Center as a possible replacement for Beyond TV, software I use like a TiVO to record television shows on the computer and then send them to my TV to be watched later.

I drank the Kool-Aid, I was hooked. Media Center totally and completely rocks! Within a week I had configured my entire home network around the Vista "server" machine, bought an XBox 360 to act as a Media Center Extender (and a damn good Grand Theft Auto 4 and Rock Band engine), and finally bought my first LCD HDTV, a 40" Toshiba Regza to connect to the XBox via a HDMI cable. Everything is working great, something I will blog about later. The entire setup is quite impressive really, though a bit on the complicated side for my non-geek family members.

So what prompted my complete 180 on Vista? Hardware, lots and lots of expensive, cutting edge computer hardware. When Vista came out, the hardware to run it on was just making its way to market. My personal computer was a 3.0gz Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, 2GB of RAM, ATI 9200 video card, and several IDE hard drives. XP ran great on this setup. Vista ran "ok", but nothing to write home about, in fact, I had to upgrade the video card to an ATI X700 to make Vista usable at all.

With some changes, this computer is now my home Vista "server". The CPU is the same, but the memory was upgraded to 3GB (I could add one more gig if I want to), the slow IDE hard drives are now used for hosting the operating system and backup purposes only, a 320GB Seagate SATA drive holds my important data, and another 500GB Seagate SATA drive is used for the television shows that are recorded by Media Center and the Windows swap file. Since this is a "server" I turn off all the "rouge and lipstick", read Aero, and disabled all services (a bunch) that I don't use. Configuring Vista is still a bitch, there are tweaks and settings hidden everywhere, but a careful and slow audit of everything in the GUI allows me to run Vista on this machine quite well, as a server. I don't think I would want to actually sit in front of it and use it, but as a server it is performing great.

Now if you think this server is just for Media Center, you would be waaaaaaay wrong. This computer does Media Center, runs the WebGuide software that allows access to Media Center from a web browser, hosts my Subversion version control server for my source code, CruiseControl.net for automated software builds and integration testing, contains all of our family's important files, performs backups, and here's the kicker... It runs www.toddtown.com. Yep, this machine also hosts a VMWare Server installation of Windows Server 2003 that runs Internet Information Server 6.0, SQL Server 2005, our eMail server, and SPAM filtering software. This old Pentium 4 is REALLY earning its keep!

The average CPU load runs about 2-40%, and will occasionally hit 80-90% when a lot is going on, and memory usage runs about 65% on average. One trick to this is my use of Hauppage PVR-150 video capture cards for the Media Center. These cards do all of the video capture encoding on their hardware, and do not tax the CPU for these tasks. If they did not, this setup would not be possible.

Well Missy just got home, and for the first time in MONTHS, we are going to have a date without kids. That new Adam Sandler (Zohan) movie BETTER BE GOOD! :)