Shane’s Drivel

First off, thumbs up for CyberPower where I bought my new PC. They sell PCs which they build with all name-brand parts. They have several suggested configurations, all of which can be customized to the nth degree.

Now, on to Vista. Hands down, the best way to get Vista is pre-installed on a new PC. It just doesn’t work with enough hardware and software to trouble yourself with installing it on an existing machine. Vista works mostly fine on my new machine.

Right out of the box, it is blue-screening on me every time I try to resume the machine from a state of suspension (low power mode). Otherwise, I’ve had no trouble.

Well…except for some video clips which I can’t play – including one sentimental clip which I made myself on my old machine. Windows Media Player tells me I’m missing a “Intel/Ligos Indeo Interactive 5.0 (IV50)” codec. Thanks, Microsoft. Way to stay backward-compatible with 2-year old software.

As far as I can tell, the aforementioned codec isn’t available anywhere for Vista. I’ve tried installing the latest such codec I could find (versio 5.11). It was spec’d for XP and it did not work on Vista.

Otherwise, Vista is working like a champ. Uh..really.