My old desktop died a few days ago. I had known over the last few days it was on it’s way out. I was getting HDD, CD/DVD, RAM and CPU errors. I’m pretty sure the motherboard was dieing. I thought the RAM upgrade and a clean upgrade to Vista would make it better. All was well for a few days until the errors started. I even removed the new RAM and rolled it back to the factory XP install. After the recovery install finished it never booted again.
I decided to upgrade to Vista Business SP1 about two weeks ago. My first impressions are that I like it. Comparing it to XP SP3 I like the enhancements made. Since when I did my install of Vista Business it started downloading updates so I wasn’t able to experience the full blown hell of Vista pre-SP1. From the research I did before my upgrade, SP1 fixed a lot of the problems that caused some users to rollback to XP SP3.
I do find it annoying that after a clean boot I login to see 33% of my 2.5 GB of RAM is already being used. I did get my feelings hurt with Vista rated my system a 1.0 over all. My graphics score and gaming score wer 1.9 and 1.0 respectivly. If I had a game for a Windows PC I would be hating life right about now. I guess the P4 3.06 GHz w/ 2.5 GB RAM and an onboard 256MB video card is a little low end for Vista Business. Funny part is when I dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 beta Compiz Fusion runs fine. But Vista won’t let me enable Aero because my onboard Intel video is too old. Not that I want to give up another 33% of RAM to be able to use Aero but still Compiz Fusion I think is better than Aero and it works fine.
I like Google Chrome so far. I downloaded it earlier today and have created a set of “application shortcuts.” Since I use a lot of the Google services Gmail, Reader, etc, this is a nice feature. I don’t need a full browser for my Gmail. I like the ability to use my web applications with more a desktop application feel.
The Most Visited tab is nice. I have a plug-in for FF that does something like that but it’s not built-in. I think the simple feel is also a plus. I hate busy browsers. That is what kills Opera and Flock for me.
Also with all the vulnerabilities cause by third-party extensions sometimes the “added value” of FF might cause some grief down the road. I will post a follow up and give a better review later but if you use lots of web services check out Google Chrome. You can download it here.
This weekend I had to restore my home office desktop to the factory original image since I lost my most recent recovery disks. I forgot how much crap software they load on new machines. I was already depressed that I couldn’t find my XP Professional media. Going back to XP Home was hard enough. But having to see all that pre-loaded crap… Knowing that even when I uninstalled it my system would still tainted by all that crap made me sick. I’m the kind of person that gets a new computer home, wipes it, tests all the hardware then loads the best version of the current OS. I had never even used the XP Home install.
I have a few homegrown scripts I use at work that use wget and curl. I was looking for something a little simpler and faster. Enter Aria2 which is a command-line program that can grab HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, Metalink, and BitTorrent files. It should be in most package manager archives but here is a link for the download. This tool is available for most Linux and UNIX distributions. The source code is also avaialable for compiling. If you have Cygwin installed this will work in Windows too.
On my Ubuntu system I was able to run:
“sudo apt-get install aria2″
Let me know if you like Arai2 and if you have any useful Linux commands or programs to share in the comments.
Related:
Aria2 + Firefox 3 (Offsite Link)
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