The Squadcast - Episode #3

(Blank)Man dinners are great! I hoped you were able to overcome the initial impressions and enjoy these tasty treats.

I'm debating buying a new laptop soon and right now I'm thinking of getting one with XP installed rather than Vista. About all I hear about Vista are incompatibility issues, and haven't been blown away by any new features. Will Vista turn out to be another Windows ME?

Cheers.

Nice video - kind of. Don't know why you needed to cover up the HungryMan logo, but those are cool frozen meals.

How'd you manage to exceed the YouTube limit of 10 mintues?

@GoOrange: Vista isn't that bad, beyond compatibility issues. It's not completely Vista's fault that some things still don't work. It's only because some companies take FOREVER to update drivers and make their software/peripherals work for Vista. Blame them for that problem. But I use Vista, and I love it. Things look nicer, simple to use, and I just LOVE Windows Media Center. And there's a few other positives about it.

But DON'T get Ultimate or Basic. Basic is too cut-down, and Ultimate is essentially worthless and expensive. Just get Home Premium only.

You'd have to be a dummy to buy Ultimate.

And I use XP SP2 as well. XP also works great, as it supports practically everything. That's my opinion.

@Go0range, for hardware compatibility, you should be more than fine with Vista at this point - what I would check would be software compatibility with your most used applications -- if they all have Vista compatible versions or are Vista compatible already, I don't think you'll risk much by going through with the upgrade - but if there are issues, getting one with XP might not be a bad idea. A friend of mine uses Vista on his desktop, but he just got a brand new ThinkPad and got it with XP (and he's a Windows Mobile developer who works closely with Microsoft!) because it better suits his needs now. Application compatibility is really what is causing most of the problems right now (at least most of the ones I experienced and most of the ones I have either observed first-hand or have read about), and Michael's right - that's not totally Microsoft's fault - but a year later, there shouldn't be this many holes - and for whatever reason, the transition to making everything Vista-ized has been much, much slower than in the past. And while I've been very critical about certain aspects of Vista and think that it was released too early (even though its release date was still considered "late"), I would never degrade it by comparing it to Windows ME (the Mistake Edition, as I call it) :-p I like to put ME in the same category as Superman IV and Rocky V -- things that I refuse to acknowledge actually happened -- because they were just that terrible.

@Michael - thanks for watching! From your comments, I know you like Microsoft a lot - and we were having some fun at their expense (and this may shock you since I'm now a Mac person, but I'm definitely not anti-Microsoft - I think they get lots of stuff right - but with Vista, they've gotten more things wrong that right - from marketing to user experience - and that's a problem when its the flagship product for the biggest company in the industry) - but I hope you'll continue to give us a shot. And we covered up the logo because we didn't want to infringe on anyone's intellectual property or copyrights (the same way you often see fake labels in TV shows). And also because it looked funny. :-)

@Christina Warren:

Ok, I understand you better. Thanks. I can see why many people see that. I admit, Microsoft implemented Vista in a pretty wrong fashion. Multiple OS's, pricing, etc. It's all awful. But I don't think Vista, itself, is really that bad, beyond compatibility.

Just ONE big question: How do you pass the 10 min. limit on this YouTube video?

I can never even exceed 4 minutes, with my videos, and the YouTube limit is 10 min. So how do you get by with that? I'm really curious.

Thanks.

@Grant Robertson:

Whoops. Didn't see that comment. Thanks for telling me.

Unfortunately, YouTube appears to have cut off any new accounts from >10 min uploads, regardless of the account type:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=71673&ctx=sibling

"Grandfathered" users who changed their account type prior to the policy shift are apparently still able to upload longer clips. :-(

@Christina - Wait a minute, are you saying they actually made Superman into a movie? Yeah right, next thing you'll be telling me there were sequels to the Matrix, or that George Lucas made sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy.

@Everyone - I just read a blog here - http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-xp-sp3-yields-performance-gains.html
that is reporting the new XP SP3 showing some slight performance gains over SP2. Not looking good for Vista.

I've also read quite about quite a few people having problems networking Vista computers with those running XP or older windows versions. I've definitely got to look into this a bit more before making a purchase, as I oftentimes have more than one computer on my home network and the older ones have older OSs.

Cheers.

Speaking for heterosexual males everywhere... Christina you are hot!

Thank you for brightening my day.

(We now return you to your regular programming)