vista ultimate – Jane Talks Tech!

The straw that broke the camel’s back

I realize that I never explained what caused me to jump ship from Ubuntu to Vista. Strangely enough, it was because of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8. In my professional and personal life, I work with PDF documents a lot and ever since I discovered the built-in OCR abilities of the Adobe Acrobat Pro version, I have gotten really used to tweaking and editing PDF documents to suit my whims. With Ubuntu, I did not want to install WINE which would have enabled me to run certain Windows applications on the Linux operating system. So, I enabled the Medibuntu Repositories on my Ubuntu installation and installed the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Well, there is a world of difference between the Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Adobe Acrobat Professional version. It only took a day of having to repeatedly type up a certain form and I decided that my experiment for Ubuntu would have to be delayed until I have another system to ‘play’ with. 🙂 This reformat of my laptop took place last week Saturday (03/14/2009) and I don’t regret the decision just yet.

However, this may change as I’m currently being subjected to the same old finicky nature of Windows. Right now, I’ve got my important programs installed. Vista’s Performance Information and Tools monitor tool tells me that there aren’t any issues affecting performance. I run the ‘Disk Cleanup‘ tool rather frequently and my laptop is set to defrag on a weekly schedule. See pics after the jump. *sigh*

Return to Vista-land, part 1

*sigh* As much as I’m reveling in the familiarity of the Windows operating system, I have to say that I miss Ubuntu and the blazing fast start up times I experienced. With the Ubuntu OS, it was actually easier to shutdown and restart the PC versus hibernating. Whereas, it was ridiculously painful to do either (shutdown/hibernate) with Vista. Now that I’ve reinstalled Windows Vista, I’m taking great pains to avoid installing craplets that serve no purpose. However, I’m sad to report that I am still experiencing issues that seem little, but are starting to drive the O.C.D. part of me nuts!

For instance, the icons for installed programs ‘disappear’. What do I mean? See for yourself. In the picture below, the icon for the Cyberlink Youcam program has been changed to a default Vista icon which typically indicates that something is wrong with a program. In this case, the program starts up fine. It’s just driving me nuts that I can’t have the pretty icon that depicts the Cyberlink Youcam program.

Thankfully, this is truly a non-issue i.e. not a dealbreaker. I was able to resolve the matter by tinkering the Cyberlink Youcam entry’s properties on the Start Menu. It’s simple: (i) You right click on the entry that lacks a custom icon and click “Properties”. (ii) You select “Change Icon” and voila!. Please note that this change may not occur right away for some strange reason and seeing as I’m rather impatient, this led to much gnashing of teeth. Cheers!