It really is a lovely piece of work. The “fins” on the bowl are (by design) reminescent of the fins on an air-cooled engine, which as all petrol-heads know is what Porsche really built its reputation on.

Don’t its ultra-modern exterior fool you into thinking that this is made of some experimental material: Porsche design pipes are made of good, tried-and-true briar. It’s a fairly large and heavy pipe; I really don’t feel comfortable holding it with my teeth alone while I smoke, for fear of cracking the stem. It’s definitely a pipe made more for a pipe smoker of experience; smoke this too quickly and the bottom of the bowl will get quite warm, although not enough to burn you of course. In that sense I guess I could see it as a pipe which reinforces slower and calmer smoking habits. Besides that, well, just look at it. I am pleased as Punch with my purchase.

Porsche Design makes four models of pipe, two straight-stems  (one with a round bottom and the other square) and two curved-stems. The sticker price on all models in the range is in the mid-400s, although you will find new ones on Ebay for a lot less. They are available in two wood tones, two titanium schemes, and two black versions (the Spirit version has gold metal rings at the stem instead of silver). It’s definitely an excellent addition to one’s pipe-rack.

The post My first Porsche… first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Discerning readers will realize from the title alone that the review isn’t going to be gushingly positive. In theory the Nook is a pretty solid device; it comes with 2 gigabytes of memory (roughly 1.3 gigabytes usable for books), it uses a combination of a 6″ e-ink screen for text display and a 3.5″ color touchscreen for navigation and book-cover display; there are also page-turning buttons set on both sides of the device. All in all it’s a smart-looking device. The Nook connects to your computer via a micro-USB slot, and as with other e-readers it comes with a USB cable and a wall-plug adapter for those times when you’re not near a computer but need to recharge the battery. The battery itself is user-replaceable, which I’m told is not the case for all reader devices.

It supports Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and EPUB format documents; PDB documents are also supported, although I have yet to come across one of those. Note that DRM’d documents can only be displayed if they were purchased from the B&N ebook store. If you live in the USA, that is. More on that later.

PDF support is quite good on this device, as long as your PDF files have been scanned for text using optical character recognition (OCR). As long as that’s done the text is formatted acceptably on the e-ink display. If you have a scanned PDF, well, the results aren’t going to be so good, because then the PDF renders each and every page as one image, and the Nook will by default display one page image entirely. This almost always results in an unreadable document because the text is very small. Those of you with Acrobat Professional will want to make sure that you both optimize and scan your documents with OCR before uploading them to the Nook. Those of you who don’t have Acrobat Pro, well, good luck. Then again I find that most of the public-domain documents you see on the internet will have been OCR’d before they’re made available.

The Nook’s memory can be expanded by adding a micro-SD card… maybe. Now that we’re past the spec stage and onto the actual user review, things tend to look rather less rosy, to be honest. There is no question that there is, in fact, a micro-SD slot on the back of the unit, next to the battery, the user guide tells you in detail how to insert a memory card in it. My question is, to what extent is micro-SD actually supported by the Nook software? My experience is that support is patchy at best, and tends to vary a great deal. Of course when I got the device home the first thing I did was to add a 8GB micro-SD card to it; I have a large-ish PDF collection I wanted to get onto the Nook, so having less than 1.5GB of space wasn’t really going to cut it. I manage my ebook collection using Calibre (the Nook itself doesn’t come with any software for ebook management), and that seemed to work well with the Nook at least for a while. To save time I put the entire collection on the micro-SD card; it doesn’t come anywhere close to filling it up, it’s less than 1000 documents. Surely that wouldn’t be a problem, right?

At first the Nook worked with the card. However as time has gone by it seems to have become unusable. When you start up the Nook and go into the Library, it automatically checks for content. Now my Nook with the micro-SD card installed, when it starts up and I navigate to the Library, displays the “Checking for new Items” message… and seems to get stuck in that mode. Because it’s a battery-powered portable device it eventually goes into power-saving mode (I have mine set to do that after 20 minutes), and when you wake it up it’s still “Checking for New Items”. One particularly frustrating morning after syncing new content into it the evening before I picked it up, and it was still “Checking for New Items”. After looking over the Support/QA forum for the nook it seems I’m not the first or only person with this problem.  Oh yes, and to add insult to injury, under “Checking for New Items” appears the message “This will only take a moment”. Which I suppose could be considered accurate if you’re a geologist. Personally I’m not that patient. I restarted my Nook over an hour ago and it’s still displaying the “Checking for New Items” message (I keep pushing on the page-turn keys periodically so it doesn’t go to sleep), so you really can’t accuse me of not being patient enough. In this time I’m certain that I could have read out the titles and author names of all 800-odd volumes in my PDF collection, yet the Nook is still struggling, with no way for me to know if it’s working or if it’s just plain frozen.

As the saying goes this leaves me high and dry. There’s not enough space in the built-in memory to put my collection, but if I use a micro-SD card the whole device becomes completely unreliable.  B&N advertises the capacity of the built-in memory as “1500 books”, but that’s the domain of fantasy. It could be 1500 epub-format books that you download from B&N (if you can do that at all, that will be looked at later), but that means that you should shell out (using average figures) at least $15,000 to Barnes & Noble. These people must be as imaginative as those Sony execs who think that people will unquestioningly re-purchase their entire DVD collections in Blu-Ray format, and while the people I know aren’t necessarily average consumers I can’t imagine that someone would be enough of a sucker to do that. Most ebooks out there are in PDF format and significantly larger in size than epubs; my ebook collection certainly is, and in that world 800 titles take up about 6 gigabytes, or 3 times the “capacity” of the Nook which is advertized as 2GB but is in fact about 1.27GB once you factor out the OS and interface.

I’ve tried to make it work again, to little avail. The one time I was able to get it to work acceptably again, I deregistered the Nook from my B&N account, slow-formatted the micro-SD card (quick format didn’t work for this), reset the Nook to factory settings, re-registered it, and re-transferred the ebooks to it. This workaround worked, but it took several hours. Not the kind of timeframe that’s acceptable if I just want to add a couple of publications to the device.

I wish I could reset the firmware to a “clean” version, but that is not an available option; you can go through the software but the only thing this does is wipe out your user settings. I attempted downloading the 1.4 firmware, transferring it to the Nook’s built-in memory and restarting it, but because I already had the 1.4 firmware installed I only get the message “Invalid Update” on the bottom right corner of the e-ink screen. Clearly whoever designed the Nook software has no idea that software can get “crufty” and corrupted over time. I’ve been in the computer business long enough to know that this happens all the time. It’s not supposed to, but it does.

Yes, I could cut down on the number of books I have on the device so it all fits in the internal memory. However, that’s a workaround, not a solution. In my experience the Nook just does not work as intended once you use the micro-SD slot which is supposedly supported by the device. That’s like someone selling you a car with shot suspension and telling you that you should only drive down smooth paved roads.  That wouldn’t be acceptable either. You’d probably punch that guy in the nose and knee him in the groin for having the audacity to tell you that it’s a functional car, and you’d be right in doing so.

I’m also not thrilled about the interface of the Nook on those occasions in the past when it did eventually manage to work. When you have a large number of items in your library navigating to a title is very frustrating but in a “we really didn’t think this thing through” kind of way. For one thing, the only way to navigate through titles is through pages that show 10 items. You can’t search for a title (not in the “My Documents” section anyway), for one thing. The titles display doesn’t “wrap around” either, so that if you feel like opening “Zymurgy for Beginners” (that’s beer-brewing BTW) and you have a large collection of ebooks you are in for a frustrating time indeed — in my case that would involve pushing the “next page” button 81 times. Now once you do have it open you can reopen it by touching the “Now Reading” button on the navigation window, and once you have opened it you will find it quicker by switching the book sort order to “recent”, but it’s still a huge flaw in the fundamental function of the reader. So not only was this not designed by a very experienced software person (see above), it clearly wasn’t designed by someone who’s ever managed an even moderately-sized documents library. The Nook also does not support folders, so the idea of categorizing anything goes out the window. You can have folders in the file structure of the device, but in the Nook interface the display assumes a flat “hierarchy” where everything is at the same level. Again, that would have been a very easy to implement; all the Nook would have needed to do is retain the way in which the files it contains were originally organized when they were transferred to the device, but the interface flattens everything and undid all the good work previously done by the user.

Nor was the Nook designed by someone familiar with even the basic rudiments of the English language, either. How do I know this? Well, when you have a book called “The science of [something]”, you naturally would file that book under “S” for “Science”. The Nook files it under “T” for “The”. This is pretty elementary stuff. You don’t need a diploma in Library Science to figure that out. Yet the Nook software fails at this, and when you have a large document library — which the Nook and other e-reader devices should be good at managing, they’re usually marketed as a way to “carry your entire library around”, the Nook specifically states in its overview “Store as many as 1,500 eBooks, eNewspapers, and eMagazines”, but if everything is filed under “The” or “A”, it’s going to be hellish just finding the publication you want to open. Calibre is an open-source, free application, and it has that bit figured out. Why can’t the Nook, which you have to pay money to get? It’s not even a particularity of English. The use of definite and indefinite articles is something that’s seen in most languages. But the Nook software completely misses that well-known grammatical feature.

And finally, the tags you add to the book in Calibre may or may not work without any apparent rhyme or reason. Good luck trying to figure out what the book “entitled” “0192853791.pdf” is — the title and author are clearly visible in Calibre, but for some reason that got lost in the rather long time it took to get copied over to the Nook (which long time could be Calibre’s fault). Not very reliable, that.

Of course the principal purpose of the device, from B&N’s point of view, is that it will help sell books, but if you’re not in the United States, right now, it’s not going to happen. The shipping address of my B&N account is in Canada where I live, and practically speaking there is nothing available to people outside the United States, not even free books that are in the public domain — and I’m talking about stuff like The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton in the late 1700s, and which is available from any number of other web sites but not from B&N. In my experience even those public-domain works that are hosted on Google Books aren’t available from the “Shop” button on your Nook, even if you can read them directly on the Google Books site from a computer located in Canada! Even worse, if you do try and “buy” it from the site you get a horribly misleading error message that states “You must have a billing address in the United States, U.S. territories, or Canada for B&N.com to process your order”. I do have a billing address in Canada on my account, I double-checked. I’m afraid that this oversight is rather typical of a product that’s been rather poorly designed and QA’d. Being physically in the United States does not help with this problem either because it’s based on the billing address in your account.

To be fair, there are about a handful of books that I could purchase through B&N.com in electronic format, but it’s a tiny fraction of 1% of the content that the store has. It’s an almost negligible selection of Simon & Schuster titles, plus stuff from some boutique publishers. People on the Nook support board seem to think that it’s some political issue.

However, in contrast, I’ve looked up random content I would be interested in on amazon.com, and in an interesting reversal it seems that the stuff that’s unavailable to me as a Canadian customer is very, very small. Chances are if they have it I can in fact buy it. Frankly if I’d been aware of this when I purchased an ebook reader, I would have bought a Kindle, but this was a bit of an impulse buy when I was physically at a store.

What else have I not covered yet… the Nook has a very basic web browser built-in, but the less said about it, the better. It’s just a beta anyway. Navigation is done through the secondary screen, but the process is pretty clunky. The Nook has a virtual keyboard for those occasions when you need to enter text, but this is clearly a data consumption (and not production) device; the keyboard has to fit the small touch screen so the keys are very small, and men will have serious difficulties using it without touching the next letter from the one they want to type, even those like myself who don’t have particularly large fingers. There are two games built-in, sudoku and chess, but again the navigation is just completely unsuited to the task at hand. Why not have a crossword instead, it would make more sense at least. The Nook has a built-in audio player, but with only 1.27GB to work with you’d have a very hard time fitting much music on there if you want to, you know, actually have books available. There are just so many flaws to the whole design that it might be understandable if the Nook had preceded the Kindle to the market, but it didn’t. Even the very idea of a touch screen for navigation is terrible because in comparison to the Amazon device it is an energy waster, not as practical as a keyboard and joystick, and when you use it in not-so-well-lit conditions it annoys the eyes and is distracting (it’s a regular backlit screen).

To be frank that’s the sort of experience (though it’s by no means the only one) that has led me to not go physically shopping anymore. In this case I’ve splurged some $200 (Nook wifi, cover, screen protector) on an unreliable device that really doesn’t suit my needs or work as intended, and being light it doesn’t even make a good paperweight. I cannot in good conscience recommend it, so if you get a Google ad at the top of this page advertising a Nook for God’s sake don’t buy one.

Can I recommend the Kindle? No. I haven’t tried it out at all, so it’s entirely possible that it suffers from the same problems as the Nook. Which I will likely find out when the Kindle 3 becomes available again, as it’s currently sold out. I could buy a Kindle DX which I think would suit me better, but that’s almost $400, if I’m going to spend that much I might as well throw some more money at the issue and get an iPad which is an entirely different and more capable device.

So my Nook seems destined to end up on top of the rather embarrassingly large pile of tech gadgets I now regret having purchased. The presentation in the stores is very good, but it’s organized carefully in such a way that the customer will just not see the major usability and reliability issues that the device suffers from; that’s what marketing is for. The Nook does have a saving grace, and it’s that it’s been cracked (“rooted”) by a group of developers over at nookdevs.com, with whose work I will hopefully be able to make a useful device out of it. Sure it’ll void my warranty, but at this point I can’t return the thing — I’m hopelessly past the 14-day satisfaction guarantee, and AFAIK the unit functions as well as B&N expects it to work — and it just isn’t usable for me in its standard configuration so I don’t really feel that I’m losing anything.

But if there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it’s that you should never, ever just buy electronics as an impulse purchase. Take it from a guy who’s spend thousands upon thousands over the years on useless stuff so you don’t have to.

The post The Barnes & Noble Nook: a Critical Canadian Review first appeared on The Clever Shark.

The post BMW 1-Series first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Before this latest purchase I used a Linksys WRT-54G for several years. The WRT-54G is a great router, very solid, very reliable, the only problem I’ve had with it was insufficient range (easily solved with booster antennas), and it is in fact one of the reasons I decided to go with Linksys again for an N router.

However, something terrible must have happened at Linksys when they came up with the 350N. In the real world, it has all the ingredients but just doesn’t do anything good with it. It’s just completely unreliable! Just about every night since it’s been in my home it’s stopped working. I’ll be sitting in front of my PC listening to internet radio, and the signal will just drop. No access to the internet, no access to my home network, nothing. The “power” light on the front of the router blinks while this is happening, and as far as I know the only way to fix it is to unplug the power cord and plug it back in. I have never needed to do that with the old router.

That is the biggest problem, but it is by no means the only one. Network traffic on the wired network is also curiously slow and choppy between my two PCs that have gigabit-ethernet cards. One of the big selling points of this router was the gigabit switch. It correctly recognizes the gigabit cards, and my computer thinks it’s connected at 1000Base-T, but in reality this switch has much worse performance than the old router which had only 100Base-T, especially when playing video files over a network.

I haven’t used the wireless that much so my opinion of that is a little less well-formed than for the other technologies, although I can report that the wireless network is often undetectable even by the computers that are set up to recognize it. Again in that case the only thing to do is to unplug and replug the AC adapter; after that is done the network shows up correctly.

Linksys makes much of the fact that this router has a USB port you can plug an external hard drive or pen drive into, which makes the contents of the drive available for sharing over the network. Sounds great in theory, but in practice any file transfers you do to or from the USB drive has maybe a 60% chance of succeeding — the other 40% of the time the shared drive will simply become invisible, and the router may hang (although by now I’m no longer sure whether it’s USB-related, or if it just happens to need its almost-daily reboot while I’m using the USB drive).

It’s not like the firmware is out of date either; I check regularly on the Linksys site for updates, but my buggy and slow 350N is fully up-to-date. It’s puzzling that a company like Cisco (who own Linksys) would put such an unfinished, low-quality out there with their logo on it, but I suspect that we’re increasingly moving towards a world where things have great specs, but are bug-ridden. And I say this as someone who’s been working in the software industry for over 10 years, so it’s not like I’m basing this opinion on just one thing. Quality has given way to stakeholder-mandated delivery deadlines, with the expected results. No matter what you buy in terms of electronic gizmos these days, expect bugs. That being said, the WRT-350N is far too buggy for me to recommend it.

So, if you’re thinking about buying this, don’t. It’s unreliable, slow, and the special features don’t really work. If you want a good deal on a router get the WRT-54G — it’s old, established, and rock-solid technology that’ll keep working for years. Something that just can’t be said about the WRT-350N.

The post Linksys WRT-350N – thumbs down. first appeared on The Clever Shark.

So a few months ago I go out and buy DiRT, the latest incarnation of the Colin McRae Rally racing series from Codemasters. From the point of view of gameplay this game is very, very, very good. It’s a very challenging and difficult game if you play it with a steering wheel controller (as I do); it’s hard enough that you don’t get bored with it.

The Problem

Yesterday I thought to myself, “why not play a little DiRT?” I hadn’t used it for a few weeks and felt like a challenge. So I pop the DVD in the drive, start DiRT, the “copy protection” system pops a window and says it’s verifying the disk, and then… nothing. My computer freezes, completely. No input is accepted from the mouse or keyboard, and the PC becomes completely unresponsive (this is XP we’re talking about). I’m forced to restart with the power button. This happens as soon as I start the game. I try it again after the restart, and get the same result.

I figured that maybe there’s a patch that will fix this. There is indeed a patch (v1.2) for the game. After the installation I start up the game, and am informed that the “content protection system” must install new drivers, which I approve, and now I must restart again before starting the game. After this restart I start the game and find that it’s fixed the freezing problem. However, while the freezing is fixed I now get the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” that Windows puts up whenever an error occurs which is so bad the computer has to restart. I try this again to confirm what’s happening, and yes it’s a BSOD. The message, which is displayed for maybe a third of a second, is “DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL…”.

What throws me is that if I start the game in safe mode I don’t get that problem. The game really isn’t playable in safe mode, though — I didn’t buy a 1650×1080 screen and a nVidia 8800 card to play games at 800×600 resolution.

So I put my detective hat on. If you can get dirt.exe to start, it seems to work. However, if you don’t use safe mode dirt.exe first starts this “protect.exe” program that tries and access the DVD drive in a very unorthodox way (apparently) and this is what’s causing the blue screen.

DiRT and StarForce

A lot of PC gamers will now think “ow, not this shit again!” Well, yes, it’s that same old shit all over again. You see, Codemasters seems to like Starforce for whatever reason. Starforce is a company that makes content protection systems for software makers. However their reputation is rather shrouded in controversy. The old version of their software has been reported to break certain optical drives by forcing them into a operating mode they didn’t support. Starforce’s official response to these reports has been to make bizarre, incoherent rants on a few internet forums accusing people who had problems of being software pirates (also note the similarly-incoherent response to BoingBoing here) so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to the trustworthiness of these fellows.

In my case it was easy to test whether or not Starforce software was causing my computer to crash. DiRT has been around for long enough that there is a well-tested No-CD crack for it. That crack (and no, I’m not linking to it in case some American reads this blog and decides to make a federal case out of it) eliminates the need for the game DVD to be in the drive while the game is running, and one of the things it does is to cause the game executable to not require the Starforce software to be running. Since all my game-related crashes and freezes so far had occurred when the protect.exe program (part of Starforce) was launched, this should solve the problem.

And it did. Thanks to a crack I can now enjoy the game I paid full-price for. So, how fucking stupid is Codemasters for still using Starforce?

Respecting the User

If I go into a store and need to speak with an assistant, the first thing I expect to hear isn’t “assume the position you fucking thief!” Yet this is what Codemasters is telling me every time I start up one of their games by using the Starforce system. And frankly, if I did go to a store and was treated that way, the last thing I’d want to do is buy anything there. And I sure as hell wouldn’t return.

So, why is Codemasters doing this? Well, maybe they’re tired of having customers. They’re such a drag when it comes to doing business, always wanting “value for money” and expecting your stuff not to break their stuff! It’d be much easier to run things without customers!

When the Starforce media fiasco came up last year I wrote an email to Codemasters telling them I wouldn’t buy their products again because they used Starforce. This year I decided to give them another chance, and look what happens — not only are they still using Starforce, but this one actually makes the game unplayable if I try and use it the normal way! That’s pretty crazy. Really, if I weren’t a knowledgeable, expert PC user I literally couldn’t make this game, which I properly purchased and paid for, work at all. All because of a protection system. If you work at Codemasters, you should know that your reputation is suffering because of this stupid external addition, in the same way that the reputation of Toshiba suffered because their laptops included batteries from Sony that had a tendency to blow up. You guys really need to keep that in mind.

I wish I could make a full review of DiRT, but I’m having too much fun with it just now. It’s a great game. But would I recommend you buy it? No. Never do business with a company that doesn’t respect its customers. I certainly won’t do it again.

As a bonus to American viewers: it’s apparently illegal under the DMCA to do what I did, so don’t do it in the USA. According to the letter of the DMCA it is against the law to use any sort of circumvention technique when using protected software, even if you have no intention of pirating the game — indeed, even if you already own it and are only using the technique to access content that you fully paid for. That’s how completely ass-frontwards American law is about the subject. So, if you are in the USA and own a copy of DiRT, it may well be that all you got for your forty bucks is a very expensive and pretty drinks coaster. Enjoy!

The post “Don’t make me use it! Now you’ve done it! You… forced me to use it!!!” -Ren Hoek first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Obviously I’m not crazy about Vista. I think it’s largely uncalled for; to an advanced user Vista really doesn’t offer much over XP, but it does consume vastly more resources. To be honest no one should buy a Vista PC that doesn’t have 2 gigabytes of memory, and the tx1218 has only one out-of-the-box.  It runs the OS fine, but when you’re using a few apps (as you would in the real world) the performance quickly becomes dismal. This is especially true with a laptop because a laptop will have a smaller, slower hard disk than a desktop, so Vista’s constantly having to go to the swap file takes a serious hit on system performance.

Doubly bad is that the tx1218 is in fact a Tablet PC. For some reason the software that comes with those HP “Home” Tablet PCs seems to tie up quite a bit of  memory and CPU time. One thing I rather liked was the fingerprint reader, but the identity manager that uses the device seems to be constantly sniffing for a place where you have to authenticate yourself as a user. That ties up resources, as does the input manager for the touch screen.

Another factor is that the tx1218, as with all TPC, is very small and really wastes no space. Among other things this means that the hard disk’s heat isn’t properly diffused, so with all the swap file access the laptop quickly grows quite warm. It’s not a bad thing if you keep your office cold in the winter — it’s a little hand-warmer, in fact! — but it’s not so practical if you have your laptop, well, on your lap. You won’t get scorched or anything like that, but you definitely feel the warmth. That may be a plus for some people Also when you flip the screen to use your laptop as a tablet the hot side is always on the bottom (unless you register that you’re left-handed, presumably) so using the tablet when it’s leaning against a desk also results in your getting warmth in an area of the body where you might not want to have it.

But those reasons aren’t why I returned the tx1218.  I returned it because it started blue-screening on me. This started when I put it to sleep after watching a movie on it last night (it’s a great laptop for that purpose, by the way). I noticed that the PC wasn’t going to sleep and the hard drive was still plugging away after a few minutes, so I opened the display again and, after a few minutes, the blue screen appeared. I tried again after the restart, and the same thing happened. This morning I ran the software recovery disk, and after the installation was done this started happening again, twice.

The blue screen info hinted at a problem with the driver that detects the power state of the laptop. I found that interesting, because this is a laptop that’s built for Vista and its “foolproof” signed drivers. It’s (I believe) purposely made incompatible with existing PC drivers for common elements like the video card. Simply put you will not find the drivers you need to make this thing work in XP. And yet even THAT hardware seems to have driver problems. When I realized that I knew I was not going to be able to fix this, so I grabbed the box, found my receipt and went on my way back to Best Buy  — which, in Canada, has a decent returns policy, as does its sister store Future Shop (I like to give credit where credit is due).

I’m guessing it was a hardware problem — basically I had bought a defective laptop. This kinda bugs me. This is the second time I have to return HP goods to the shop because of a hardware malfunction. Granted, one of them was an open-box floor demo, but still it made me think that either I’m extremely unlucky with buying PCs or that HP has a seriously quality assurance problem. It’s worrisome to think this, however, because HP provides computers for a very large number of people and institutions. It makes me wonder how many people buy a computer at a store like that, having trust in the brand, only to find that they’ve bought a dud a couple of weeks down the line. And how many places like banks and government offices are running with computers that aren’t reliable. And what that lack of reliability could mean in terms of security issues.

My system is quicker than baseball’s. Two strikes and you’re out. So, HP is off my list of computers to buy in the future.  Also any computer that’s “made for Vista”. The fact is that because of its new foundation Vista really is unfixable once it starts breaking, and it’s really not good value for the resources it requires, even if you get the license for “free” with a (cost-adjusted) new PC. I’m someone who enjoys installing Linux on PCs, but reinstalling Vista really isn’t as much fun. It also takes much longer (hours sometimes, depending on your hardware) and it’s not nearly as customizeable.

As for its “great new features” — UAC, Aero, the new connection manager, the new certificates interface and the explorer improvements — I give them a resounding “meh”. UAC in particular was pretty much a waste of development time. Power users like myself won’t use it because people like me are paranoid and use one or more filesystem protection system already; and novice users (who are still administrators by default!) will be utterly confused by it and just end up approving every request UAC sends them. I didn’t use Aero at all because I had set my user experience parameters to “best performance” in the hope that that would cause my Tablet PC to spring to life and become responsive (it didn’t). The new certificates interface is actually causing companies to tell their employees they can’t use Vista to access their certificate-enabled wireless networks (incorrectly by the way, I resolved the issue in two minutes at my employer’s facilities) and the connection manager seems like just a way to annoy users by its new interface, which is just one more step in the way of you changing the parameters you want to change.

And DirectX10? If I wanted it that much I would have bought an Xbox 360. That’s a hell of a lot less bothersome than running Vista. We PC gamers sadly have to get used to the idea that we’re second class citizens in the games, er, game now. Just look at the Unreal Tournament 3 interface. It’s lifted straight off a console, and it “works” poorly on the PC as an interface. You just don’t get the sort of enhanced, customizeable experience that you got with the Unreal Tournament games of years gone by. And that, unfortunately, seems to be the future of PC gaming — waiting for ports of console games, sometimes poorly-coded (GTA San Andreas was a real bugfest on the PC), and with no real advantage over the console versions aside from the more versatile keyboard-and-mouse controller setup. From a gamer’s POV the games get to the consoles faster (usually), and the console will usually get a more-thoroughly-tested product. So even DX10, Vista’s party piece, ultimately doesn’t justify it.

Throw in often-reported reports of device driver problems and you pretty much come to see Vista as a great answer to a question nobody was asking. Unless that question was “how can Microsoft make more money from Windows licensing”. And I’m pretty damn sure no end user was asking THAT question.

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