VistaJuice

Yesterday I was browsing around CompUSA and I noticed that there is a same laptop I have (Vaio SZ-370) but running Vista without any issues. Sony put a same laptop, tagged it as SZ-470 - and just installed Vista on it.

The issue is that all of the Vista compatible driver updates for my model (SZ-370) ARE NOT available yet for me to download - but they are clearly available on the SZ-400 series support page.

Why is Sony doing this? SZ-400 series are clearly exactly same as SZ-300 series hardware-wise - the only difference is that they run Vista out of the box. All of the drivers in SZ-400 would work just FINE with my notebook - but Sony is not making them available to me...

I talked to Sony Representative over Live Chat - all he could tell me is - keep on checking the website for new updates to your model! Idiot!

I hate SONY!

George Ou from ZDNet talks about some issues he encountered with Vista's Photo Gallery.

I do not like the Photo Gallery that much myself, primarily because of those little things he mentioned, but I did not find it a big issue. I always used a third party application for my photos - Namely Nikon's PictureProject which came with my Nikon D40, and lately Adobe's Lightroom - which I find just plain beautiful.

The quirks in Vista's Photo Gallery are:

1. Lack of support for RAW image formats. Camera manufacturers have the updates available on their sites - but according to George, Photo Gallery does prompt that the updates are available - but a click on a download button takes him somewhere else. I could not replicate this but maybe it's because I got the update from Nikon already.
2. Images sometimes appear blurry if opened in the Photo Gallery or if they are shown in a slide show. I experienced this - and at first I thought I was the problem... It turns out Photo Gallery processes images for some reason first - probably to make them smaller and faster to load - which makes them blurry.

So all in all - Photo Gallery will be fine for pretty much anyone, but if you are using some higher end camera - you then know what you're doing and will definitely have some other applications to process your images in.

Source: ZDNet

For the past couple of days I've been having strange issues with Vista on iMac. Namely, if I leave the computer alone for 5 minutes, it would go to a blank screen (all black) and never come out of it until I restart.

This was annoying the living hell out of me... I disabled the Dream Scene package and now it all works like a charm. Also, with the Dream Scene out - I do not get the random Windows Manager restarts due to some video driver failures.

So, if you are having some issues - try getting the Dream Scene out. It sucks without it, but what can one do? I rather have a stable system than 5 minutes of pretty animated desktop :)

P.S. - Scratch out where I said Dream Scene works in last post. :)