From: mike 



http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS/70513035
2/-1/State

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The first few millions of us PC users have endured a few months inside the
maw of the beast called Vista. During that time, some nasty downsides to
Microsoft's Corp.'s no-longer-brand-new Windows operating system have
become painfully apparent.

More to the point, since Vista went on sale to the general public Jan. 30,
we've found a few ways to make the best of the rude and cranky snags to the
new operating system that will capture your computer sooner or later -
probably sooner. Happily, much that we've learned about Vista works great
for Windows XP as well.

First and foremost, let's say there is substantial truth in those
commercials from Apple Inc. showing the Vista guy in a rumpled business
suit surrounded by bodyguards who interrupt with a silly warning every time
he tries to talk to the hip young Mac guy.

No matter how loosey-goosey you set Vista's security tools, there will be
repeated times when you try to do something only to have the computer
screen go black and then pop up with a small message box asking if you
really want to "continue" what you're doing. You think it over
and say yes, and you're hit with another box that asks you if you want to
"allow" whatever you said to "continue."

Second on my list of grievances is the effort by Microsoft Corp. to turn
Vista into an instantly available music/record store through the omnibus
built-in program used to play music, watch videos, rip CDs, sync music
players and search for tunes.

It is galling, for example, to be frustrated because a video or song you
just downloaded won't play in the Vista Media Player only to be further
accosted with an error message that reads "Contacting Store ..."
(Microsoft's online competitor to iTunes).

This brings us to what may be the best fix for vexed Vista video victims
- a free program called VLC media player from the open-source
programming group called VideoLAN.org .

VLC comes with built-in tools called codecs (coder/decoders) that specify
the settings needed by a program to play different audio and video formats
clogging the Internet landscape of YouTube, MySpace, iFilm, DivX, etc.

Even on my hot rod of a dual-core Intel-fired HP Pavilion with 2 gigabytes
of memory, Vista's merchandise-laden Media Player comes up much slower than
does VLC, which appears on the desktop as fast as you can click its icon.
VLC is a music and movie/animation player rather than a storefront, and it
lacks most of the bells and whistles, and frills and fopperies, and reboots
and redundancies of the Vista Media Player. VLC shines particularly when
using it to display videos that one acquires from the tens of thousands of
places online where movies short and long are found.

A great many of these files won't run on Microsoft's player anyway, such as
the FLV for YouTube videos and Apple's widely used MOV format. Beyond that,
the free software handles just about anything you can throw at it except,
appropriately enough, the proprietary WMV format from Microsoft.

You can play music files as well on VLC, but that is one of the places
where the new Vista shines with its good-looking interface, big fat icons
for album covers, simple and powerful playlists and psychedelic
visualizations.

Enough niceness toward the world's largest computer software company: The
experience of installing VLC points out the nasty compatibility sideshow to
the epic global move of PCs to Vista.

Microsoft's engineers loaded Vista with code that conflicts big-time with
many programs that were written for Windows. Too many programs work great
on XP only to crash, burn and die on Vista.

For example, the DirectX video display feature of Vista disables VLC's
ability to display the visual side of videos, so in its default settings
all you get is the soundtrack.

Thanks to a Web search using the words Vista and VLC, I quickly found the
setting change needed to restore vision on Vista machines.

It remains to be seen how much software that people came to love in Windows
XP will be toast when popped into a Vista machine. I can tell you that two
of my favorites won't work right in Vista: the superb and free Treepad
personal information manager and the new Xara Xtreme Pro graphic
illustration program.

When Microsoft execs made the rounds before Vista arrived, they were full
of assurances that moving the software you currently own over to Vista
would be a cakewalk.

In theory, you would just give the program icon a right-click and open the
Compatibility tab in the pop-up that appears. When you do this and it
works, Vista dims, blinks and changes, and then advises you that it is
taking away the trademark translucent windows, cascading windows and other
new features you just spent hundreds of dollars buying.

Microsoft's geniuses probably think these messages sound helpful. Here's
how they sound to me: "You can buy new software, Coates, or you can
rot."
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 /m

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