Vista w/ Boot Camp problems

ben0207

So I've just installed Vista on my iMac (well a few days ago) and I'm having what can only be described as a whole shitstorm of problems. List time!

1. I'm using MacDrive to read my OS X partitions hard drive, allowing iTunes (and WMP) to read my iTunes library. It's a bodge job, but it worked well enough in XP. Now, seemingly randomly I get all sorts of crazy crackling in my music and it slows down and goes all wierd. This ain't right, is it? How can I fix it?
2. Just generally performance seems to be way off. But according to the Vista Performance Checker dealie, I rate 4.9 at minimum. Is it just because Vista is shit? I'm getting no performance issues in OS X, nor did I ever in XP
3. Can I switch off those annoying prompts that darken the screen everytime I go to do something on my own computer?
4. Instead of just formatting my old Windows partition, the installer made me back it up to a "Windows.old" folder that I can't delete, either using the GUI or DOS ('cept it isn't DOS, it's no more powerful than the console in CSS)
5. Not really a problem as such, but can somebody explain why my window borders are transparent enough to be annoying and cause a performance hit, but not transparent enough to be at all useful?
6. Would it be worth nuking the hard drive entirely and starting afresh with XP? At least that was useable, and this music problem in particular is driving me nuts.

So, err, answer away. Please?

Philodox

I can answer a couple of those questions. The prompt that causes the screen to go black is UAC. It's MS's attempt to get people used to the idea of not running as an administrator all the time. If you want to disable it you can under the control panel under user accounts.

The transparent window borders are Aero, Vista's new user interface. This too can be disabled through the control panel under Personalize, then Window Colour and Appearance.

If you don't like UAC and Aero, why exactly did you install Vista?

ben0207

Okay so the UAC* thing is gone and everything looks like Windows 95. Good.

Now it has even less reason to be having (I assume) performance issues playing MP3s.




*Doesn't UAC stand for United Aerospace Somethingorother in something or other?

Philodox

Unless your hardware is really old (which it's not) those things should have no impact on Vista. I'm writing this from my Vista partition on my MBP right now. I have yet to see a noticeable slowdown in anything I do since moving from XP to Vista. The skippng is probably caused by some subtle incompatibility between MacDrive and Vista.

GrimReaper

1. I've tried Macdrive, under both a real machine and a virtual machine it caused NOTHING but problems. From bluescreens to other problems. I just don't think it's a good product. Unfortunately, I don't know of any other products for windows that can read HFS partitions.
2. Yeah, it's Vista. It doesn't run good on anything less than 1GB of ram and frankly I would only run it on 2GB of ram or over and a decent high end machine.
3. Yes, see what Philodox said.
4. Are you trying to delete windows.old whilst you're actually logged into windows? The best way to delete it is using a special boot cd like bartpe. I'd check to make sure the windows.old directory isn't used before you go deleting it though. Also, you could do a fresh install of windows making sure when you use the vista cd to actually format the drive beforehand.
5. Windows Vista is poorly thought out regarding UI design.
6. Yes, if you're just wanting to occasionally use windows stuff go with XP. There is ZERO advantage to using Vista over XP at this time.