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Malik (6/11/12)

I had another weekend fly by me with more things to do that were not my idea of fun than time to actually relax. Still, getting any time to relax is a bonus, and there was some of that time. I mean I had enough time to follow the Mariners flopping to the Dodgers in the second and third game of their series, but pulling off the only-once-before six pitcher no hitter. While the M's still look far too raw to be a MLB level team, seeing something like a six pitcher no hitter in which there is a winning pitcher and a save for the closer is awesome.

I also did find the time to finish Psychonauts. I had about four stages left and got those done this weekend. It's sad to put that game behind me, since as I felt when I played Beyond Good and Evil later than I should have, Psychonauts is a true masterpiece that will forever remain more ignored than it deserves. The game had amazing platforming, smooth controls, really fun powers, and humor that you can only find in something that is from Double Fine.

With Psychonauts done, I'm now hoping to find a game to play on my PC that actually uses the new technology I've slapped in this thing recently instead of just picking another old Double Fine game (which is fun to play). I mean I have a PC that can really make some impressive moves in game playing and I need to find something that will make it look that way. Too bad I've already put Skyrim and Saints Row The Third behind me since those would be ideal games for this rig.

Most of my weekend, however, was tied into PC upgrades...and my loathing of Windows Vista. I don't have Vista (Windows 7 is a damned good OS considering that it came right after Microsoft dumbed down their OSes with Vista), but my mother does. She also had a PC that was ancient enough to be capped at 2GB of RAM. So, with that in mind, I had given her all of my old PC, minus the HDDs and DVD burner that I kept. I knew this setup really well (having gamed on it for nearly half a decade), and I was the one who was volunteered to do the upgrade. I figured, with how smoothly things when with upgrading from that PC to my current with Windows 7, that this would be simple...and I was wrong.

In simple terms, Vista is crap. Instead of having a repair system in place like XP and 7 both have, Vista doesn't have a true system for repairing the OS if too many new pieces of hardware are present. It only had a HDD repair system (the same basic idea of one that Microsoft included back in DOS with CHKDSK and SCANDISK). This meant, after putting the new hardware together, putting in a Vista OS containing HDD into the new rig will not allow one to simply update drivers. It means an entirely new installation of Vista is needed...and it means I get to play technical support on the phone for three hours of my weekend.

Luckily, I think this nightmare is behind me, but it does give me further appreciation for Windows 7. With 7, I had (at first) a new power supply, mother board, CPU, and RAM going with a HDD with Windows 7 as the only OS. After turning on the power, I simply had to wait an extra minute for Windows 7 to come up and then run my driver disk for my mother board. No hassle, no fresh Windows install, and no artifacts chased me down afterwards. Microsoft did right with Windows 7 (and XP, which was also about this simple when I'd use it back in the day). With Vista, they really dumbed things down, as well as setting up an OS that felt like it was designed to hand hold instead of function. Vista, when it sees a problem, demands to solve it since you are an idiot. Windows 7, on the other hand, will offer to help if you mess up the system, but will still be nice enough to know you're not an idiot and will let you solve the mess you made if you chose. Give me an OS that doesn't think I'm an idiot any day of the week over one that is convinced I don't know what I'm doing.

Malik

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