Let me begin by saying that in the short day and a half that I have had Windows Vista, I already hate it with a passion. Over $300 worth of hardware is just sitting in my computer because Vista cannot figure out what to do with it, and I cannot figure out how to tell Vista what to do with it. The User Account Control feature drives me insane. Yes, Vista, I am aware that I have a recurring error message that I have not yet figured out the source of, there is really no need to keep bringing up something that logs me out of Windows just to show me something I already know. I won't even get started on the slowness of response times (which I have a fairly good idea could be at least partially attributed to the lack of hardware response mentioned above). However, I have come too far with this to simply go back to XP. After around 6 solid hours of trying to find proper drivers that will install, I'm ready to scream. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder graphics card and a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card. Vista recognizes the graphics, but sees the sound simply as a Multimedia Audio Device. It says it has drivers for the sound card, but when it goes to install them, the install times out. It doesnt even have drivers for the ATI card, so I downloaded some from the ATI website, but when I tried to install it, I got halfway through the process and was given an error message that says another instance of an installer is running and I should finish that one first. There is no other installer running. After all this is corrected, I will work on defeating the "interactive services dialog detection," which is what I imagine technological [bleep] will be like. Any suggestions?
My computer:
AMD Sempron 2800+ 2.0GHz
512 MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 All-In-Wonder
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
80 GB Hard Disk (42 GB free)