[floppydisk]

Right click on the taskbar --> Properties --> Start Menu --> Classic Start menu

And if that doesn't suffice, then you might wanna take a closer look at this.

Thanks for that Gobbler, that start menu was really pissing me off.

[Spoon Poetic]

AAAGH Vista is driving me INSANE. It doesn't have any of the drivers to support any freaking hardware - not a brand new printer, not a flash drive, nothing! And then it tells you it's downloading the driver, but then the driver doesn't work. And Windows Update pops up about every few hours, and if you are in the bathroom or something, it will reboot your computer with no warning.
I hate it.

[floppydisk]

Not that bad for me. I'm using Omega Windows XP drivers for my graphics right now because of a wierd glitch involving gamma. You're right about nothing working though... It's rather pissing me off. Plus, I keep getting random hard locks, though that may be because my hard drive is about to fail...

[Deepsycher]

Not that bad for me. I'm using Omega Windows XP drivers for my graphics right now because of a wierd glitch involving gamma. You're right about nothing working though... It's rather pissing me off. Plus, I keep getting random hard locks, though that may be because my hard drive is about to fail...

I don't know if you know this or whether it has happened to you but I once thought that a drive was on its way out. I put in another drive and it kept on spinning down and the heads sometimes kept on clicking as the previous drive did. So when I checked the power leads and toggled that whilst it was on it caused the symptoms.

I found that some of the female molex pins inside the power connector were too wide leaving space for the male pins to move around inside. It is a common thing I find nowadays. Me, I would toggle and check the tightness of the female molex pins and use a small flat head screwdriver to tighten the metal inbetween the connector if they are too loose, or try another power connector.

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 05 April 2007 - 03:28 PM

[Emu]

No HAL (meaning no Hardware Abstraction Layer) anymore. That means no more support for DirectSound and all the fancy things that came with it, which ultimately means: No EAX right now. I don't know what they've been thinking, but it can't be much.

[Gobbler]

Damn, why didn't I think of that earlier?

[Chyld]

New laptop for my birthday, and it came with Vista, so I kinda had it thrust upon me really. Now, my needs from a computer are very few (works the Internet, does typing, a few basic games, downloads and plays songs/videos), so I've not suffered from driver issues really. Since Dawn of War plays perfectly fine, I won't worry. My thoughts, however:

- The Start Menu plain has wang in its mouth. I don't want a list you have to scroll up and down, but I don't want the same start menu Win98 had! Hopefully the program mentioned earlier sorts that, but we'll see.
- PREEMPTIVE EDIT: That new Start Menu program? Straight Up Nice. Muchos gracias, Gobbler my matey.
- I hate Media Player 11. If I wanted a clunkety-ass iTunes layout, I'd get iTunes and a Mac I couldn't use. Problem is, I've no idea what other media players are good, so I'm stuck. Any suggestions?
- Also, I'm not sure if its the copying from old laptop to new via 1gb pen drive, or Vista, but all my songs have got three seconds of laggy garbling on them. Probably the former, but there ya go.
- Mostly, it is just stuff a fancy new skin could do on XP. Definatly not worth whatever they're charging for it just now.
- I do, however, like the mini-display that appears when you hold your mouse over an item on the taskbar, showing what that application looks like. Also, the Alt-Winkey screenchangething.
- Did anyone else get some Google Gadgets thing with their copy of Vista? I did. Right now, I have a big clock/calendar, CPU/RAM meter, random picture display, and notepad, plus an apple I can click to "eat", on the right of my screen. A mixture of the whimsical, the handy, the nifty, and the actually essential.

Yeah, that's about it.

[Gobbler]

- PREEMPTIVE EDIT: That new Start Menu program? Straight Up Nice. Muchos gracias, Gobbler my matey.

You're welcome.

I hate Media Player 11. If I wanted a clunkety-ass iTunes layout, I'd get iTunes and a Mac I couldn't use. Problem is, I've no idea what other media players are good, so I'm stuck. Any suggestions?

Hmm... Winamp with the MD3 skin for audio, VLC for video, alternatively mplayer (didn't test that one on Vista though).

- Also, I'm not sure if its the copying from old laptop to new via 1gb pen drive, or Vista, but all my songs have got three seconds of laggy garbling on them. Probably the former, but there ya go.

The former.

- Mostly, it is just stuff a fancy new skin could do on XP. Definatly not worth whatever they're charging for it just now.

There's some fancy new stuff for hardware and such things underneath, but I guess you could have those too within XP, so yes, quite.

- Did anyone else get some Google Gadgets thing with their copy of Vista? I did.

That's Microsoft's take on the whole Widget or Gadget or whatever it is they call it nowadays thing, also known as ye Windows Sidebar now.

[Chyld]

I hate Media Player 11

- Also, I'm not sure if its the copying from old laptop to new via 1gb pen drive, or Vista, but all my songs have got three seconds of laggy garbling on them. Probably the former, but there ya go.

Being right sick of my songs fucking up, I took ten minutes out of my precious insomnia time to test what was going on. I tried the songs that came across on the pen drive, and it garbled them for three seconds at exactly twenty seconds before the end of the song.

I worked my way through my albums (I sent them in alphabetical order, so this was easy), testing, all of them garbling at 20secs to go, until it was obvious that it wasn't just the songs that came across by pen drive.

The final straw came when an album I haven't even uncased since I lost my virginity (long time ago, folks) went into my CD drive, got burned half an hour ago, and also garbled at 20 seconds.

Time for a new media player, methinks...

[floppydisk]

VLC doesn't work on Vista for me. No video, but it still plays because it know the file name and also knows the video length. Pretty wierd.

[Gobbler]

Yeah, you need to change the video output to make it work.

Settings --> Settings... --> Video --> Output Modules --> (check the "Advanced Options" checkbox at the bottom right) --> Change the VideoOutput Mode to something that works. I'm using OpenGL mode right now, though it's known to be a little slow on some older systems.

Alternatively, I realized that the good ol' Zoom Player has been doing great since I last used it a couple of years ago.

[floppydisk]

Thanks man, that helped. I guess I can just ask you about problems with Vista.. :P

[Gobbler]

Hey, that's what I'm here for.

(Wish I could say "If I can't fix it, it ain't broke".)