The Snakes that Guard the Door

Hanging from the front door knob this morning, were two rubber snakes that a friend of ours gave to Evelyn to play with, some time ago. Evelyn enjoys playing with them quite a bit. They do find themselves in precarious situations from time to time, such as hanging from a doorknob. Being respectful of the snakes, I left them where they were. I'm sure Evelyn will find another use for them before I get home.

Progress on the 'learning Japanese' front. Having put down the Hiragana flash cards for a few days, I was pleased to see I missed only two out of the set of 25 I have so far. Time to add more to the mix, and keep going. Once I get Hiragana learned, it's on to Katakana and using the audio course I have in hand. I may look for others down the road, but I'm going to make use of what I have, first, even if it isn't the best quality.

Didn't cough nearly as much last night as I did the night before, so I was able to get some sleep. Good thing, because I'm going to need it today. Work has been piling up around here, and it's difficult to find time to do things lately. I'm working out some new organizational methods now that we've acquired Office 2007. New ways to track and keep tabs on things. Now all I have to do is follow the plan. Often, that's the hardest part. :-)

Speaking of new software, I've been running Vista at home for a week or so now. I've run into a few issues, and am wondering if I should go back to Windows XP until I can get some more hardware upgrades. What I've seen so far is:

1) My sound card, a SoundBlaster Live-24, does not support the microphone under Vista. This prevents me from using the voice capabilities of Google Chat, my Japanese language learning software, or voice recognition, which is supposed to be a great new feature of Vista.

2) The OS as a rule, is very sluggish on my system. Granted, I am using the minimum required RAM to run it, but I do have good processor speed and peripheral hardware. Vista also does not care for my brand-spanking-new video card. It looked wonderful under XP, but Vista claims it isn't juicy enough for some applications or features.

3) While it ran fine on the old system, and even on the old video card, Neverwinter Nights runs horribly slow and choppy on Vista. I even shut down a lot of major processes in order to give the game more RAM. You'd think with more ram and a newer video card, it would look OK. It looks like stop motion animation. Scary. Normally, for one game, I wouldn't care. This, however is one of my three major games that I play on a regular basis, with Half-Life 2 and Sudoku taking the other two slots. Since most of what I do on this box is play games, you can see where this is a significant setback.

4) Nero, which is the burning software that came with my DVD+RW drive, does not play well under Vista. I can burn from other sources in Vista, but I did spend a good deal of time learning how to use Nero properly, to make DVDs and a few other projects. While it is only an inconvenience to have to learn new burning software, I would have to do it through Media Center. The standard burning tools in Vista refuse to work with my hardware. This means I can back up pictures, music, and videos. What about my other files? I'd have to move them over the network to another machine, and back up from there. Seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Now in order run Vista the way it should be, I would have to both upgrade my RAM and my video card. I just bought a new video card, so I'm not spending another $100 - $200 doing that. The proper RAM upgrade for my machine would cost around $200. I'm not doing that, either. While I do appreciate the free copy of Vista Ultimate, I don't know that I'm ready to run with it at this time. Maybe with the next computer.

I have also toyed with the idea of downgrading to Windows 2000 Pro, and seeing how the applications I have run on that. If Windows 2000 would support them, that is. I still say the best gaming system ever (to date) was my Athlon 850, running Windows 98SE. That was the box that rocked. Ah, those were the days. Quake III, Diablo II, my ATI Rage Fury 128... *sniff* An age of innocence, purity, and frag-fests. Maybe I will try 2000, just to see what happens. I can always just reset the box back to the factory settings, if need be.

Looks like another re-image is in my future.