Notice how the left is about 10 times taller than the right. What changed? Switching over to Linux, and that's it. I'm still doing basically the same thing as before. You can see that from the graph of unique domains.

Now, it does show it as less, but nowhere near the drop off as shown in the previous graph. Which leads me to believe that either I had some program that was doing crap it shouldn't have been, or Linux is just better at caching DNS info.

If you're wondering, the complete drop off is where I switched over to linux. It took me a while to get around setting up opendns.

At around the 48 hour mark, I'm using 90% of my RAM with another 500 MB of pagefile usage, and that's with Firefox exited. I try to play a song in foobar2000 that has been paused for more than 5 minutes, it takes about 30 seconds to a good minute for it to finally start playing, all while the rest of the computer is basically useless while it's trying to figure itself out.

Want to open the start menu? Better give about 15 seconds to get that worked out. O, you actually want to click something on it? Give me another 30 seconds to figure that out. O, you actually clicked something while I was trying to figure out how to make a little blue rectangle? Well, click it again. You know I can't do two things at once. O, you don't want to see the start menu anymore? Well, that will take me another 15 seconds.

Another thing, explorer sucks. It just flat out sucks. There is not one advantage over the old explorer.

First up, the title bar, or lack there of, when using Aero. Yeah, that translucent part is pretty cool looking at first, but having to look at a little strip to figure out folder your in, is annoying.

Next up, that little strip. It among itself isn't the problem, it's what they think that little strip replaces. That o-so-useful up a directory button. Everyone and their grandmothers used that button. They knew what it did, and it was comfortable. But with Vista, they said fuck that and replaced it with a directory list lineage thing and a refresh button. A refresh button, what the hell? Pretty sure it will automatically update itself, so why do I need to refresh it again? And why can I click the current folder name like all it's previous directories? It's like doing 'cd .'. Yeah, I can do it, but what's the point. Why don't you make the current directory look kinda different? That would tell me a little more than just looking exactly the same as the rest.

Next, the menus. Why are they gone by default, and when they're there, they're under the back buttons and that stupid ass strip? At least they lock the toolbars by default, even though when they're unlocked, they can't be fucking moved.

Me: "Hey, I want the menus at the top, where they are for every other program ever"
Vista: "What, are you stupid? You don't need those, we made big buttons that do less, but are more productive. STFU, you're stupid."

And next are those stupid big button menus. What, can people not right click anymore or want the ability to change the size of icons in a matter of 3 seconds using some big as slide? And how often am I going to have to email or print something from explorer that constitutes a big ass button for every folder or file?

And finally, the viewing of the files. I like detailed view showing Name, Size, Type, and Date modified for every folder everywhere. I don't want some shitty music folder view, ever. It gives you some option to make the default view for every folder the one that you're currently using, but does that work? Not very well. It still liked giving me music folder views for those damn folders that were obviously music. Or it liked adding some stupid column, like Tags. Only 1 person in 1000 are going to sit around and tag their files, especially since it requires Right-Click > Properties > Details > Tags Box, which is way too complicated for Vista, since we have to a big ass Print button in explorer to be able to print anything.

Now, the one thing that I liked about Vista, has started to act really shitty. The network connection. It has been performing fine and dandy for a while, it would have it's slip ups, but usually a couple flushes or a reconnect would fix that up, but now it's disconnecting me about every 5 minutes, and it'll reconnect within seconds after the disconnect, which is just enough to kick me off gaim, and pop up a window showing it's reconnecting, which it does very promptly.

Anyway, I've had enough. I'm going back to XP, and Ubunutu once Feisty Fawn comes out. That's it. I'm not coming back to Vista. If there are some huge leaps of development in SP1, I might consider it, but don't hold your breath.

That might not be impressive all by itself, but my damn wireless card had never worked with it. I guess the Netgear drivers just suck that much, since we already know they don't do 64 bit drivers. But Vista's default driver for it seems to do the job. Sweet. Now I can sniff packets to my hearts desire.

Download WG311v3 x64 Driver – Zip File

Download WG311v3 x64 Driver – Gzipped

Though I don't have a x64 Windows install to test it, it should work. But I do know it works in Ubuntu 6.10 x86_64. Here's a quick guide:

First, install ndiswrapper if you haven't already. If you have the DVD or internet access, you should be able to go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, search for 'ndiswrapper', and install ndiswrapper, ndiswrapper-utils, and ndiswrapper-utils-1.8. If this doesn't work, you have to download and follow the instructions from the sourceforge site.

Next, download the drivers, and extract them. Find out the path that they extracted to or copy them to an easier to access directory. I copied mine to the desktop.

Next, start up Terminal and run sudo ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/WG311v3-x64/WG311v3.INF changing the ~/…/WG311v3.INF to the path of your driver. That should've wrapped the driver.

Run ndiswrapper -l to check if it did wrap it. Should return something like this:
Installed drivers:
wg311v3 driver installed, hardware present

Now to insert it, run
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
It shouldn't return anything.

Now, run dmesg and check if it says: ndiswrapper: driver wg311v3 loaded. If it does, it's good.

To scan for networks, run sudo iwlist wlan0 scan. Hopefully, it will show the available networks.

To connect, go to System > Administration > Networking, select 'Wireless Device', click Properties. Enter the ssid of the network you want to connect to, and if necessary, the rest of the fields. Then close the properties window, and click the box to the left of 'Wireless Device' to enable it.

Or, if you like the command line, run iwconfig wlan0 essid "router_ssid" replacing router_ssid with whatever the router it is that you want to connect to. Then iwconfig wlan0 up to enable the device.

Hope that helps.

Let's go over the apps I use:
1. Firefox. Basically the same on Linux as it is on Windows.
2. Notepad++. Only for Windows, but used Kate during my short time that I used Suse. Pretty sure I can find one that I like.
3. SmartFTP/CuteFTP. Damn, also Windows only, but Konqueror has pretty good FTP support, and FileZilla ain't bad either.
4. VLC Player. No problem here.
5. foobar2000. Damn you Windows. Though Amarok is pretty good.
6. Alcohol 120%. Shit. Nero for Linux maybe. Maybe it can run under Wine. Not sure about this one.
7. AnyDVD + DVDShrink. Don't have an answer for this one either.
8. uTorrent. This one is a PITA. With somewhere around 728 torrents in it with a lot having custom title I would really prefer to not get rid of, this is probably the biggest reason I'm still using Windows. There is some hope though since it can run under wine.
9. Office. OpenOffice is there, though I've had some problems with it before with compatibility with MS Office.
10. LogMeIn. There's VNC, but I have the problem of not being able to forward any ports, which means I'm shit out of luck there. But I don't really need this, I kinda like using it, but really there is no need for it.
11. Python, Apache, PHP, MySQL. All good there.
12. AIM. GAIM.
There probably are a few others, but I couldn't remember them, so I must not use them all that much. Games, though I don't play them all that much, I would just use an XP install. Other things are web based, like gmail.

So, about 8 / 12 that will go over to linux easily. Not too bad really.

Now how hard will installing be. Luckily I have some experience with my install of Suse.
1. WiFi card has top use ndiswrapper and Win2k drivers, but still have those from the Suse.
2. Video card. Check
3. Partitioning and Space. Problem. With a 160 and 120 GB, I only have about 5 GB free total. I plan on installing this over one partition that I was going to use for Mac, which is full now, but can be wiped, which is only 10 GB. Now I have to split that and make it 2 ext3 partitions. Probably like 9 GB and 1 GB. Seems kinda workable. Now, if I buy a new, big SATA drive, then this is solved.
4. Codecs and all that. Automatix.

Really, if I can get the partitioning done correctly, there isn't that much stopping me, and if Vista keeps pissing me off, there's no doubt that I'll switch. I could also get rid of this 10 GB Vista partition and I'll have more space for Linux. Hooray!

Aero looks kinda cool, but it's laggy and I ended up getting annoyed with it. It's like Beryl, looks cool, but after probably the third time, it just gets in the way. Going back to the old school Windows look is pretty bad looking. It also disables the fancy switch windows thing for some reason. I'm not sure how translucent title bars make fancy window switching possible, but apparently it does.

The search on the start menu is cool. Probably the best feature of the whole thing, and for some reason my connection is better. Don't know why though, but it doesn't like ICS for some reason. Googling it, it doesn't seem like I'm the only one. It would give a socket error for creating new connections for like 15 minutes every like 6 hours or so. I think disabling ICS fixed it though.

Another annoyance, Windows Media Player doesn't close, it just goes away when you exit it, so shit can start playing, and you don't know what the hell is going on.

XAMPP also seems to have some problems with file access or something. Moving an uploaded file with PHP just doesn't seem to work. Maybe it's a problem with my script, but I can't find it.

Voice recognition is kinda cool in the tutorial, but using it regularly is just piss poor.

Anyway, I'm going to install XP on another partition, maybe Ubuntu, and I'll probably end up switching back to that. My old XP install was getting pretty bad, which is why I kinda tried to switch over to Vista permanently, else the XP install will just be for gaming.