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I’d previously experimented with Windows Vista, having downloaded it from MSDN as soon as it was released. To my dismay, although Vista itself performed fine, there was a woeful lack of support from hardware and software vendors. This may have been forgiveable if I were using a beta version of Vista during its beta period, but I was using the final release version – albeit two months before it came out for retail – after a lengthy beta process. Ultimately, I went back to XP.

With innovations like dual-core CPUs becoming mainstream I was able to persuade myself it was time for a new desktop computer. I replaced my Pentium IV 3.0GHz machine with an Intel E6700 dual-core beastie. While at it, I threw in 4Gb Corsair RAM, an Antec 900 case and an nVidia 8800GTX GPU.

I divided the primary hard drive into two divisions, making one a Windows XP Pro partition and the other Windows Vista Ultimate. There have been guides online to making a dual-boot machine but it really is extremely simple: just split the hard drive, install XP first, then Vista. Make sure both partitions are primary partitions. Done.

The bigger complication is in making the two alternate systems handle data seamlessly. I always relocate “My Documents” and all data onto a second hard drive. I used Computer Management to give this drive the same letter under both OS’s, and then relocated “My Documents” for both (and, with Vista, I also relocated “Pictures”, “Music” and “Videos” to correlate to “My Pictures”, “My Music” and “My Videos”.)

Finally, I then installed all my applications under both operating systems – Visual Studio, PhotoShop, Office 2007 and others. Any patches had to be applied to both systems, but this wasn’t a significant burden.

The result is an excellent combination of current reliability with XP and future performance with Vista. Some tasks I can only perform in Windows XP at this time – for instance, iTunes is still not yet Vista-compatible. However, IE 7 really comes into its own under Vista, and the new Media Centre makes much better use of a widescreen display.

Surprisingly, my system’s rating under Vista is 5.4 – which is the same as on the Pentium IV. The “bottleneck” (such as it is, with still a 5.4 rating) both times is the SATA hard drives – the CPU, RAM and video cards all rate higher. Nevertheless, there is one definite significant improvement: this rig is far, far quieter than the PIV. It’s whisper-quiet, even. But most importantly, nVidia finally have a Vista driver! The lack of video driver was a major factor in me reverting to XP previously – whereas it appears many others had a more creative solution – namely start a class action suite against nVidia!

The Microsoft scripting games for 2007 have begun! I’m competing for Australia, taking the opportunity to learn PowerShell.

(Well, the second really

Fans of the Nintendo Wii will have no doubt seen the articles about talented artist, Paul Thiel, making 6″ sculptures based on player’s Mii characters. He first made one for his friend Allison McCarthy who understandably loved it. It occurred to them both there may be a market for such things and they released five auctions on eBay, possibly as a testing ground and to help determine a market price.

Guess who won auction #1? To quote the memorable Jack Black, on claiming creation of the one-chord song, Me!

Here’s just a couple of the many, many pieces on the sculptures and auctions:
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/23/artist-to-offer-3d-sculptures-of-your-mii/
http://www.thewiiexperience.com/get-your-mii-sculptures/
http://www.gamingbits.com/content/view/1632/
http://dpad.gotfrag.com/wii/story/36330/

What’s not to love about a Mii sculpture? Firstly, the Mii’s are generally representations of the player’s persona, if not a representation of their own body? Secondly, Wii owners enjoy the sheer fun, exercise and social nature of the console. But thirdly, an item like this is completely novel and is absolutely unique.

It will be several weeks before I receive it, but I can boast bragging rights to having the first Mii sculpture available for sale in the world.

Not only can you not write using IE 7, but you cannot add new categories in FireFox.

The WordPress support forums are full of incidents but no fixes have come out. I’ve even now uploaded the very latest nightly build – 7th February 2007 – and no joy.

Let’s be clear, WordPress is an incredible product but my confidence in it has been dimished by release 2.1 which contains a number of defects that break existing functionality