Oh yeah, by the way… I bought a condo yesterday

I’m now a proud homeowner. Well, technically, I will officially be in about two weeks when I get the keys and can move in.

Woooooooooohoooooooooo!

We’re just one day away from the consumer launch of Microsoft Windows Vista, and most mainstream hardware manufacturers don’t yet have final drivers for the operating system. I’m talking to you, Creative, nVidia and ATi. I don’t care how much you have to change your driver structure for Vista; it still stinks for consumers who go to install the operating system only to find their hardware is half-supported.

Right now, I’m experiencing a lot of joy with my ATi Radeon X1900 Pro video card and my Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card in this respect. My ATi card seems to be okay in Direct3d, but runs quite slower than it did under XP, which I hope is just temporary, considering I dropped more than $500 for this video card. OpenGL doesn’t work at all under these beta drivers, so any games that use it (think Doom3, Quake, Far Cry, etc.) are a no-go right now.

Don’t even get me started about the beta Creative sound card drivers; they constantly “glitch up”, sending nasty noise through my speakers while I’m playing music. And sometimes they’ll forget they’re in 5.1 surround mode, and suddenly start playing the music out of just the rear channels. Huh?! And did I mention all EAX acceleration in games is going away? A feature that Creative has touted for years as giving them an advantage is now moot under Vista’s driver architecture, and Creative loves to whine about it. Supposedly they’re working on a wrapper to automagically wrap EAX calls to the newer OpenAL logic.. but I’ve yet to see anything work like that.

And in the end, Microsoft will be blamed for these driver problems, because no one wants to educate the public about the value in keeping your drivers up to date for all components of your system. The concept isn’t even in most people’s heads. And it probably shouldn’t be. It should “just work(tm)”, you know? Vista has advanced driver support under Windows Update, which looks promising at keeping everyone’s machine up to date with the latest drivers. And you have companies like Dell with support programs that run in your tray to check vendor-specific updates — Dell’s will even tell you when a BIOS update is available. That’s cool, but what about people without a Dell? etc…

Anyway. That’s my rant of the morning. Here’s hoping the Vista launch tomorrow comes with a minimum of problems. Are you planning on upgrading? Do your friends or businesses?

I did a fresh install when the final was released months ago, and I love it. I don’t miss XP in the slightest. I think after goofing with it for a day or so, you’ll feel the same.

Just got back from NAMM, and I’m so exhausted. I put up some photos online here, if you want to check them out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/iransofaraway/20070120NAMM

Hah. Apparently I’m 59% like Marky Mark? Rock on!

Click them to make them bigger..

So much to go over… hrm. Let’s see.

Well, I bought a new car, a 2007 Nissan Altima 3.5SL, fully loaded. It’s dark blue. Yep yep yep.

I love it so far, no complaints. And it gets great gas mileage.

Life is busy, but good. My review is any day now, so cross your fingers, pray, or do whatever it is you do to impart good wishes upon someone else, please!

I returned my Zune, but not for the reason(s) you think. I did so in order to help pay my down payment on my car. I’m also selling some other things.. debated selling my XBox360, but decided to keep it for now. I plan on buying the HD-DVD drive later on to enjoy movies on… and I’m sure by the time I get around to it, it will be cheaper than the current $200 price tag.

And now, for some completely random stuff that I think is way cool.

• Chris Pirillo’s wedding reception music. I like the list, and it’s sometimes hard to find a well-thought out selection. I’m keeping it for ideas on my own wedding..
• Vanishing Point, an online challenge/game by Microsoft, for a buttload of prizes. Microsoft started it off in Las Vegas, taking over the Bellagio’s fountains to give away clues to solving the first “box” of puzzles. Check out the video from that event! Crazy. I love how they synchronized everything.. the lights, the water, the projections.. heh.
• BauerCount.com, a website that aims to list every person that Jack Bauer kills while saving our country’s butt. The details are amazing, listing the weapon and method used, as well as including video and pictures. Almost a bit too fanatic, hrm? But awesome.
• Disneyland now has a special “night-time” mode for the Space Mountain and California Screamin’ coasters. Who doesn’t want to rock out to the Red Hot Chili Peppers while riding a coaster? “Higher Ground” is supposedly on Space Mountain, and California Screamin’ plays “Around The World”, kind of like the Disneyland commercials are now…
• Speaking of Disneyland, I found a site detailing Club 33 in its entirety. It’s that door next to the Blue Bayou, with the “33” plaque next to it. Maybe you never noticed it?
• Bruce Campbell smells good, thanks to Old Spice. If you have it, you don’t need it. If you need it, you don’t have it. If you have it, you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don’t need less of it. You need it, to get it. And you certaintly need it to get more of it. Just watch. Bruce is awesome.
• Season 3 Battlestar Galactica bloopers! (PG-13 rated) I don’t get the random Bush stuff thrown in there, but whatever. Pretty funny if you’re a fan of the show.
• If you’re making minimum payments on your loans/credit cards, you’re dumb. Use this online calculator to see just how much money you’re throwing away. Really opened my eyes a bit. Even paying just $10 more a month will help lots in the long run.
• JkDefrag — one of the best freeware defragmentation programs for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista that I’ve ever come across. It’s now replaced Microsoft’s defragmenter on all of my machines. Why buy a product like Diskeeper (which helps fund Scientology, by the way) when you can get something better for free?

My 4Runner just got back from the shop, and I’ve been informed that my engine is… not so well. It looks like the previous owner didn’t really take care of it, and an oil change is showing just how “dirty” the inside is. Bummer. So I’m looking for a new (yes, brand new) car.

I’m crazy, I know. My mission is to find something I like, but don’t end up paying more than $600/month for. And I’m $5000 upside-down on my current loan…

So yeah, fun times! Hopefully Jeff can help me out, since he works for Nissan, and maybe get me a deal on one of those new Altimas. They are looking pretty spiffy right now. My boss just got an Infiniti G35S (Infiniti = Nissan’s luxury line) and it is the cat’s meow of features. The new Altimas have most of them, and cost $20k less. Sign me up for some of that!

I just quickly priced out two Altimas… one for $28,965 and another for $32,175. The more expensive one has bluetooth phone capability as well as MP3 playback, etc. which would be nice, but is it worth $4k?

Does anyone have any advice for car shopping? What not to fall for, etc.? I’ve learned a little bit, having bought two cars in my lifetime from dealerships, but I still end up walking away feeling like a sucker.

I’m having a dispute right now with someone on eBay about a knock-off Zune cable I bought. When I had my iPod, I had bought similiar “third-party” connectors for it and had no problems. This particular cable though is not wide enough on the connector end. The pins are correct, so if you line it up centered exactly and force it in, it will connect. But then of course it’s not locked in, because the side locks don’t reach where they’re supposed to. Anyway, I e-mailed the seller, and he got pretty defensive, saying that the supplier tested it with a Zune and assured him it worked, and that he’s had many others buy this cable without complaints. I don’t see how that’s even remotely possible. I’ve sent him the pic to the right (which I snapped this morning and colored in to show the differences) and we’ll see what he comes back with next.

Just, ugh. Next time I’ll spring the $20 or whatever and get an official cable instead.

http://inquisitivesensitive.blogspot.com/

Be sure to send her some love. She’s just starting out in the blogging world.

Otherwise, she’ll give you the evil eye. See evidence to the right.

The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 really blew me away in theatres. When I looked into how the Davy Jones effects were pulled off, I was amazed to find that Davy Jones is actually a fully digital actor. We’ve come a long way from the day of Jar Jar Binks, eh? ILM used Bill Nighy’s performance, dressed up in a silly suit made up of dots, to do a sort of “realtime” motion capture on the set, without needing a crazy set up of multiple cameras. Pretty cool stuff. They put together a web-site to show off the things they did for the movie. To the right is a thumbnail of their “experience” section, which allows you to roll-over the film footage to show the raw footage. Pretty nifty.

Okay, so I’ve had the Zune for a while now. Here’s some more thoughts:

• The official 1.2 version is out, supporting Vista fully. I probably shouldn’t have hacked together an installation earlier, because installing the official 1.2 version just forced me to re-do my library. Oh well, my dumb fault. Other than that, smooth sailing on the upgrade.
• There’s no way to easily define what “type” of video you’re putting on the Zune. For example, in iTunes, you could right click on a video and specify that it’s a  TV show, or a music video, or movie, etc… but not so in the Zune software, at least not yet. Microsoft has an overly-technical writeup on the Zune site on how to provide content for the Zune with the proper metadata, but this won’t be helpful to consumers at all; just those mass-producing content for the Zune. Here’s hoping a newer version fixes this problem. Also, please, let us mass-set this categorization across numerous files! In iTunes, you couldn’t just select a bunch of videos and set them all as music videos.. you had to go through them one-by-one. Ugh.
• Microsoft is fully onboard with the Zune, it seems. This is good news, and hopefully they stick to it, to keep a strong competition going with Apple.
• The software reminds me too much of Windows Media Player. It obviously was based on the WMP codebase, but there’s just some design decisions I really disagree with, such as the sidebar to the right that tries to contain a playlist editor, sync list, burn list, and “what’s playing” functionality, swapable by clicking icons above the sidebar. I just hate that sidebar, and almost always want it closed.
• Playlists do not remember what order you sort them in! This was a feature in iTunes that I used all the time, and really miss it on my Zune. In iTunes, it would remember specific sorting rules for each playlist, even smart playlists. It would also transfer this sorting to your iPod. I found a way to sort of hack-it in the Zune interface, by using the sidebar’s playlist editor, and forcing it to sort by album, etc. — but that has problems of it’s own, leading me to my next point:
• When you choose to order by “album” in the interface, you get a smart sort based on album, then track number. Good. But if you do this while making an auto playlist, like so:
  
  You do not get this smart sorting method. You instead get an album title sort, with no secondary sorts thrown in. Your tracknumbers are random, but your albums are clumped together. Huh?
• The Zune marketplace has about the same timeout problems as the iTunes store. You may double click a song to preview it, and a few seconds later get a time out message. Really annoying. Also happens if you’re downloading/buying content from the Marketplace.
• The protected Zune marketplace files are sometimes too “picky” about being re-synched to a Zune. The rules may be different for non-ZunePass files, but on mine, after 3 syncs (add it to the Zune, then remove it, etc.) to the Zune, the file will no longer transfer, and you have to re-download it. I ran into this a lot, when I first reset my Zune and re-added all of the songs… most people probably won’t run into this problem, though.
• There’s no way to select files in an auto-playlist and be able to delete them from the hard drive. If you select files when just looking at a normal playlist, or your “library” view, you can select any number of files, right click and select “delete”. You get asked if you just want to remove the files from your library, or if you want them removed from your library and hard drive as well. It would be nice to be able to do this directly from an auto-playlist. I believe I could, in iTunes.

More bulletpoints to follow as I find them. I still stick with my decision to go with the Zune, and haven’t run into any dealbreakers for me yet. Don’t take my criticism as negative press! Just small complaints.

I have to be honest, this post started as a huge rant against Creative and their "boo-hoo" attitude about Vista drivers. But I decided to instead write about the benefits that the audio changes in Vista will bring about. We should be nearing the end of the lifetime of specialized cards with dedicated APU's (audio processing units), such as the Creative X-Fi, thanks to most audio processing being shifted back to CPU's, now that dual-core and quad-core processors are a reality.

And thank goodness. I've owned about 4 Creative soundcards over the years, and they were all considered the best available at the time.. but I always had numerous problems with them, either with hardware compability or drivers. And who really is competing with Creative right now anyhow? I briefly tried a Philips soundcard, only to find that the drivers were complete junk. Should I just use my motherboard's onboard sound? That might work if I just have a stereo speaker system, but myself, and many others have 4.1, 5.1 and sometimes even 7.1 surround sound systems hooked up to our computers. Most on-board audio solutions either don't let you hook up more than 2 speakers, or they severely limit your surround capabilities.

For example, let's say I was listening to something that had a lot of bass in it. You'd expect your subwoofer to be playing back the deeper tones, right? On older multi-speaker systems, there was a crossover built into the amplifier unit that always sent certain frequencies to your subwoofer. With newer and more typical multi-speaker systems (such as those run through receivers), your amplifier is expecting you to just send the raw audio signal to your subwoofer. Creative cards such as the Audigy and X-Fi have a feature that does this for you automatically. That way the "booms" go to your subwoofer instead of wimply trying to be recreated by your tiny cube speakers. Most on-board sound cards do not have this feature! It just isn't in their hardware at all.

But thanks to Vista's new audio stack, you'll be able to get this feature "for free", as well as other enhancements:

Bass Management does what I was just describing, essentially acting as a cross-over for all audio passing through your speakers. It defaults to 80Hz, which may be just coincidence, but it’s what THX recommends if you’re using all-THX approved hardware/speakers. Most people are not. So you may want to up it to 100 or 120, which is what most people are using anyway. Check your actual speaker’s specifications to see what frequencies the speakers and subwoofer can reproduce and go from there. In the “settings” panel for this enhancement, you are able to adjust the crossover, change the room size (unknown what effect this has), and inverse the subwoofer’s polarity.

Speaker Fill allows you to “upmix” a stereo signal into more than 2 speakers. With this option enabled, there are no settings you can change. It just automagically happens. It seems to do a fairly decent job, and is comparable to the “CMSS” feature found on Creative soundcards. Liken it to a version of “Dolby Pro-Logic” for all your audio content.

Room Correction is a pretty exciting feature that is usually only found in high-end receivers. It allows you to use your computer’s microphone, placed at eye/head level, to automatically have Vista calculate what delay and amplification each speaker should have. This is very important in order to ensure that an equal sound level is coming from all speakers based on your regular listening position. My harmon/kardon receiver has this feature built into the remote, and it made a huge difference for me in setting up my speakers initially.

Loudness Equalization is essentially a real-time soft compression on all audio, making all sound stay at a constant level, whether it’s blaring or quiet. This comes in handy for watching videos, etc. where the volume may be different for each one.

I went looking on the web to see if anyone else had done an extensive write-up on Windows Vista’s audio stack, from more of a consumer perspective, but didn’t come up with much. I found some very technical documentation on Microsoft’s site, as well as a write up from Microsoft’s Larry Osterman regarding what’s changed in Vista versus XP. I also found an article on ExtremeTech about gaming audio and Vista, which is a subject I was very interested in, because I play a lot of PC games.

When Microsoft announced the new Vista audio stack, they also dropped a “bombshell” — DirectSound3D could no longer be accelerated by hardware. This meant that those shiny Audigy, X-Fi, etc. cards were now semi-useless. You can read all about it on the OpenAL site. I’ve already run into this problem myself. I installed Dungeon Siege II and fired it up, went into the options and tried to turn EAX on, only to have the game tell me I don’t have EAX hardware. Huh? Well, the lack of hardware acceleration explains it. Creative is suggesting that everyone move to the “OpenAL” model of sound acceleration, which only recently (past 2 years or so?) started to get used by developers. Here’s hoping that the development studios are paying attention to this technical paradigm shift, and are planning accordingly.

According to the ExtremeTech article, Creative is working on a “wrapper” to emulate full DirectSound and pass those calls to the OpenAL driver, in order to fix these older games. Here’s hoping it works. It would be a shame to lose EAX/3D audio on almost 80% of my games…

I remember when Half-Life 2 was about to come out.. I was shocked that Valve wasn’t implementing EAX support into the game. But then I realized that they were actually doing something better for the consumer by allowing any audio chipset to reproduce the game’s sound effects. That’s why right now, in Vista, I can run HL2 on both my X-Fi and on-board audio and get the same great sound quality out of both, with full effects in 5.1. And that’s the way it should be, in my humble opinion.

That’s him on the right, supposedly. Enjoy!

Was digging through my old photos today, and found a long-lost image from the ol’ western days of an ancient relative (on the right) and his gang of troublemakers:

Man, those were the days. Look at all those money bags! And his gal sure is pretty…

For some reason, sometimes older entries (like my Halloween ones) show up on LiveJournal again as if they were brand new posts.

I have no idea why that happens, and it seems like a bug in their code. Just check the date on them.. hopefully LJ is showing that right?

She’s been begging me to put up a more recent/better photo of us, so here goes

After having so much fun with the iTunes software in Windows (especially Vista), I decided a change needed to happen. On Friday on bought a Zune. So far my experience has been most enjoyable, despite the fact that the Zune software isn’t even supported on Vista yet. But there are workarounds.

Here’s some reasons why I’m digging the Zune over the iPod right now:

• On setup, the Zune software found all of my iTunes music and imported it. It even imported my playlists and song ratings, thankfully. I’d hate to have to re-rate all my songs (it took me months!) The import process took a while, but that was to be expected, since I have nearly 20,000 songs.
• The Zune plays all the same formats of the iPod and more (Windows Media Audio.) I was worried that the Zune would have to convert the MPEG4/AAC (.m4a) files that iTunes ripped into a format that it could play… but no, it just works!
• I had to re-create my “smart playlists” (Zune’s software calls them Auto Playlists.) No biggie. The rule engine looks a little different than smart playlists, but it works the same. I was able to set my few smart playlists back up in minutes.
• The sync speed is crazy fast. To sync around 2000 songs, it only took about 10 minutes. If I hook it back up and sync it again (with no changes), it syncs in less than a second. Woot. On my iPod, iTunes would sit there for minutes trying to sync up all the data, even if nothing changed.
• For some reason, the Zune software wants to convert most of my music videos/movies to a Zune-compatable format. I suspect this is because I did not encode the MPEG-4 video in the proper resolution/bitrate that the Zune supports. I’ll have to do more research on this to see exactly what’s up.
• The Zune interface blows the iPod’s away. It’s way more graphical, and the “sideways menus” are much more friendly than having to go “up” a menu on an iPod. For example, when I choose “music” from the main menu, I’m taking to a series of menus at the top (selectable by using the left and right keys), and the list of the currently selected menu item. Hitting left and right, I can switch between artists, albums, playlists, genres and songs. On the iPod, I would have had to go “up” in the menu structure to change what category to search by.
• When music is playing, the album art takes up about 80% of the screen. Hitting the center button “zooms in” on the artwork and overlays a menu allowing you to change the song’s rating, turn shuffle and repeat on/off, send the file to a friend, or flag the song. The “flag” feature lets you set aside some songs for whatever purpose you wish. Maybe you just really dig those tracks, or you want to flag them to be deleted, whatever.
• Photos and video look great. You turn the Zune sideways to watch them. There is a small indentation in the back of the Zune (underneath the controls) so your hand can more comfortably grip the Zune when it’s sideways. Neat.

And to be fair, here are some of my gripes thus far:

• The Zune software “monitors” folders for changes, which I kinda dig, but at the same time, I’m used to how iTunes does it. Maybe I haven’t found out how to do this yet, but I don’t think there’s a way to just import a single song/picture/video into your library. You have to put it into one of your monitored folders. I want to be able to just drag something onto the Zune software, and have it imported/copied to my library.
• Can’t rip directly to AAC/MPEG4 format. You have to choose between WMA, WMA lossless and MP3. The MP3 encoder they use isn’t the best (LAME would be much better.) So I’m stuck using WMA at 192kbps, which sounds great, by the way. Just a different format to get used to, I guess.
• More to come in time…

After going back and forth with MySpace’s lovely tech. support, it seems they have finally cancelled my account. Thank God— good riddance and all that. Let it be known that it’s taken me an entire month to cancel my account, and at least 6 e-mails back and forth. I dread to think what a parent would have to go through to get their child’s account cancelled…

Please, leave the sinking ship that is MySpace. If you have kids, explain to them why it sucks, and why they should ignore the sexually-themed advertisements on the site. If you run a network at a company, why are you wasting the bandwidth?

And this shall probably be the last post on the subject of MySpace.

http://www.digg.com/politics/90_Million_Americans_Believe_Government_Behind_9_11

Ahh, the internet. It makes everyone a certifiable structural engineer, fireman, policeman, etc…

Forget Occam’s Razor. It’s clearly a government conspiracy! OMGZ!!!

Do a little research before using the conspiracy card, eh guys? And no, “Loose Change” doesn’t count. Check out “Screw Loose Change” to counter that. Next, please?

http://www.filmz.ru/pub/8/7626_1.htm has six photos from Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. They’re pretty much the same outfits and very “teasery”, but cool non-the-less. My favorite shot is the one to the right… click it to make it bigger.

F-Secure writes about a brand new MySpace worm that is making its way like crazy throughout profiles. It spreads by executing a bit of JavaScript embedded in a Quicktime file. And of course, users can embed whatever objects they want on their pages!

Spyware Sucks has a write-up sharing my same thoughts of MySpace: block it from your networks now. If you have kids, educate them about the badness of the site and get them off of it. If you’re in charge of IT at a company, filter it out.

Unless you want to stick with a website that sends password information unencrypted, lets its usernames and passwords get phished, and semi-knowingly exposes (and possibly infects) a million users to an old exploit via a banner ad.

Sheesh.

I’m almost at my wit’s end with iTunes. Syncing my iPod for the first time this week (with just music and pictures) took all day (~8 hours.) Totally unacceptable. I don’t believe this is problem is specific to Vista, because XP was slow as well for me; it just wasn’t this slow.

My installation of Vista has the latest Intel chipset drivers, ensuring my hard drive is reading/writing as fast as possible, so that’s not the problem. Check out my Vista experience rating to confirm this… 5.7 out of 6 for hard disk speed:

Furthermore, none of the other “heavy” applications I run have experienced a slowdown in going from XP to Vista. In fact, Photoshop seems to be running faster, as do my video games (Oblivion’s level transitions are super fast now!)

Looking around the web for iTunes+slow posts, I came up with this forum post from someone experiencing very-slow network share access under iTunes. Funny enough, I had this exact problem a year or so ago, and ended up ditching my network audio drive, instead copying all the files to my local hard drive. When that still wasn’t speedy enough, I reconfigured my hard drives into RAID0, with very little improvement in speed.

Scott Hanselman also recently wrote a post about iTunes 7 and slowness. He comments more on the UI aspect of iTunes sucking more under Windows/Vista, and I have to agree. Re-sizing the iTunes window is terribly slow, as is the “filtering on the fly” of search results, etc. — in general, iTunes’s speed is a joke.

So what can Apple do to speed things up?

• Implement a real database back-end that will keep track of your files, metadata and thumbnails, making searches more “realtime”.
• Utilize the new Windows Presentation Framework (it’s what gives Vista its flashy interfaces) to make the interface. WPF will even work on XP (via .NET 3.0) so I don’t know why Apple is holding out on this one. Resizing delays, window redraws, etc. would become a thing of the past.
• Optimize the code for Windows. I have a hard time believing that Apple is doing all they can to squeeze performance out of Windows. This might be off-topic a bit, but even though my machine exceeds the minimum requirements put forth by Apple, my machine still cannot play 1080p Quicktime7 video without “pausing” every couple of seconds, yet my machine can handle 1080p WMV-HD just fine. Something is wrong with that picture.

So clearly, iTunes is doing something wrong here and Apple needs to address it. Apple has a feedback form for Vista and Quicktime, so if you’re having problems too, you should fill it out, cross your fingers, and hope your e-mail actually goes to someone who gives a darn.

Apparently disabling UAC had a weird side-effect: Onfolio doesn't work anymore! Onfolio is a Windows Live Toolbar add-on that displays RSS feeds in a "newspaper" format inside of Internet Explorer. If you turn off UAC, Onfolio's newspapers no longer work, and show script errors. Arg... why!?

So I guess UAC will have to be on for now, and I'll just deal with the iTunes problems for now, and hope Apple fixes it soon.

Update: Please check out my other entry involving poor speed in general with iTunes 7 and Vista.

Running with the default Vista installation, you get a feature called User Account Control, which basically lets you be an Administrator on the machine (like you were by default in XP), but every program you run will run in the context of a normal user, in order to prevent programs from having too much access to parts of the operating system, say, a virus or spyware.

It seemed to work okay, only running into a problem with a few programs. There's an option for programs that won't behave that can force the program to run as an administrator, and that usually takes care of the problem. iTunes, though, complains that it's in "compatability mode". Also, every now and then inside of iTunes, it will pop up an error saying that it could not write to the iTunes library. This causes you to lose any new files you just added, etc.-- major bummer.

Searching Google for iTunes and Vista doesn't really yield any valuable results, and I have to run iTunes.. just no way around it for my iPod.. so I had to disable UAC. I probably was going to disable it anyway, being a "advanced user", but for typical PC users, I can see UAC being a great tool in preventing bad software from affecting your operating system.

Anyway, hopefully this blog entry is helpful to anyone else who stumbles on this problem, and hopefully Apple's next version of iTunes takes care of the problems..

This past weekend, I wiped my laptop and main machine clean at home and installed the final version of Vista, available from MSDN if you have a subscription.

I'm loving it so far, but I ran into some hard drive problems along the way.. namely one of my hard drives dying in the middle of installing iTunes. Joy! Not Vista's fault, though.

Anyway, Vista's start menu is completely different from XP, and by default always shows the top used applications. You have to click "All Programs" to see your full start menu. And the view then switches to a single scrolling list, with folders that expand inside this list. What's been driving me crazy is that clicking/hovering to open the start menu folders takes seconds. CPU usage goes to 100%, and the start menu becomes sluggish while this happens. Then the folder opens. Unacceptable.

I did a search on Google, and funny enough, people have been having this problem since early betas of Vista. It's crazy that it hasn't been fixed in the final, but here's hoping Microsoft releases some quick fix later on, and preferably before the January public release, hrm?

In the meantime, like that forum post suggests, if you go into your start menu options and turn off the highlighting of new programs, it solves the problem. I'm guessing that Vista is trying to look up the "last modified date" of every start menu item on the fly, and that's causing the delay?