Windows Vista SP1

For anyone still pursuing Vista as their OS of choice, I will share my experience of the SP1 "upgrade".

Firstly, this is a pack of bugfixes, it doesn't come with any useful add-ons as far as I can tell.

Secondly, there were rumours that drivers are more rigidly controlled in SP1 which concerned me somewhat as I had managed to do that which some said was impossible, which was to make my trusty old Philips Toucams work!

One piece of good news is that the Toucam still works in K3CCDTools v1. However Craterlet can still capture images from it though the "Setup Camera" function doesn't work, so everything is Autoand 320x240 which is useless for astro applications.

The Meade LPI, which never worked with Meade Envision, but which did work with K3CCD and Craterlet, now no longer works at all! I will look to see if there's a fix.

My Video Editor, Adobe Premiere Elements 3, no longer works - it crashes on trying to create or open a project. How SP1 got through testing without anyone noticing this is quite extraordinary, it's a pretty mainstream application! And if anyone tells me to go and buy v4 they'll be told to bog off - my other editor is Cyberlink Power Director and that will have to do for the time being - at least it works!

There is good news - Starry Night Backyard 3.1 which used to stutter along like a dead tortoise to the point of being practically unusable now works perfectly.

The case for setting up an XP partition is looking pretty necessary!

To add to this, a reinstall of the driver has got the LPI up and running in both K3CCD and Craterlet though still not in Envisage.

Anyone else having fun with Vista? One gets the feeling that MS let it out much too soon although it has some very nice features.

Anyone else having fun with Vista?

Nope, sticking with XP for now, thats for the heads up.

I have two laptops both running XP. One I got free during a search on a building due for demolition which is acting as a reserve in case the first one goes belly up. Vista is toooo scary. Almost all of my hardware would go belly up. What was wrong with XP in the first place? that prompted this stupid carp.

Something to add to the list... Registax4 seems to be using about twice the amount of memory and is running very VERY slowly after SP1 installation.

Cheers,
G.

What was wrong with XP in the first place?

Everybody had it already, so MS wasn't making nearly enough money.

Is it still possible to get a new computer with XP installed on it? My laptop is kinda old and is showing signs of going kaput soon. I get the impression that all the PC vendors are pushing Vista, and I really don't want it!