Kevin Arthur

It seems that the Vista DVD can’t find the driver for my new HDD.  Or, more likely, it’s corrupted somehow.  Grrr…

I’m in the middle of a post about Camp Oljato. But that can wait.  I got a new hard drive, and today, I’m installing that and installing Vista Ultimate onto it.  Clean install.  Which means that there will be no lingering traces of an operating that was supposed to not work.  I’ve got an external casing for the old HD, and I’m just going to use that to transfer files.  Which makes this incredibly less painful :D .

It is. It doesn’t really feel like it though… Well, kinda does. But whatever.  It is.  Which is why I’ve started playing Rainbow Six Vegas.  Dam that game’s fun…

Fuck. I still haven’t gone back to Deviant Art yet.  I’ve been kinda putting it off… cause there’s going to be so much to do. I’m sure I’ve got tons of stuff to catch up on at WL, if the sarge hasn’t kicked me out yet =/.

Running. Started running again yesterday… Dam I’m out of shape… but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I guess.

Cub Scout Day Camp. Incredibly fun. I’m an assistant den chief, so I just sit down and watch the kids being dealt with by some other person who’s running a station or something. Owen (the den chief) just kinda leaves sometimes, so i’ve got to take care of them. 11:45-5… :(

 I might start Drivers Ed at some point.  Soon. I hope. :D.

Anyway, Oljato (scout camp) next week, then free time :D.  Maybe I’ll work on my website a bit more (which, by the way, got a logo), and explore Linux (I’ve got it installed on another machine, and whenever I try to run Firefox, it tells me I’m missing a library that is most defiantly there, with a link to it in multiple bin folders. -_-).  I guess that’s all for now :D.

Upgrading to the final version of Vista fixed some problems I had forgot even existed. I wasn’t able to print from my computer, because Windows couldn’t connect to the networked printer. I assumed that this was because of a Vista-XP problem. Well, I was wrong. I can now print without any trouble at all.  There were some new problems, most likely caused by me changing the OS on several jumpy programs without telling them. The first couple times I loaded the OS, it was incredibly slow, yet the RAM usage was below 50%. I checked the processor, and sure enough, it was at 100%.  I looked for a while, and It seemed McAfee was using way more than it should. I reinstalled it, and everything returned to normal.

Windows Ultimate Extras is an amazing system. It gives Microsoft a chance to go back after Vista was finished and add things that would make it better. The first two ones they released were Texas Hold’em (yes, poker. It’s actually amazingly fun, and oddly real), and enhancements to Vista’s Drive Encryption program (BitLocker). I don’t use BitLocker, so I haven’t checked on the enhancements yet.  Microsoft also has a third extra on the way, which they released a preview for: DreamScene. It allows you to use movie files as desktop backgrounds. Stardock (a Windows customization company) released a program, developed with Microsoft, that allowed people to create .dream files, which made distribution easier.  This is all made possible by Windows Vista’s hardware acceleration, which uses as little CPU and RAM as possible, while still projecting a moving image onto the desktop. Put a couple semi-transparent windows on top of that, plus a semi-transparent taskbar, and Vista barely even sweats.

Of course, there are still some problems that need to be fixed. I think I’m getting a bigger hard drive soon, so I’ll do a clean install of Vista on that. When school gets out.