Wheelz Online

Being a web deveoper I use a lot of the Adobe Creative suite products like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop and Flash.  So when I made the move to mac I bought the design package which had all these in.  Its great, it all ‘just works’ and it was quite quick to install.  Anyway, one of my clients wanted some work with video on there so I looked around for apps which I could use and came to Premier Pro.  Now, because the mac I have is only a macbook there is no way I would be able to run it on one so I decided to buy it for PC.  Also because of all the other work I do I thought I may as well buy the Master collection which contains everything.

So over an hour later, its still installing but there are 12 programs to put on so I’m fine with that.  Bingo, its on.  So I go to have a look at PP and its fine; Dreamweaver fine; photoshop fine.  After Effects which i was looking forward to playing with and seeing what it did crashed my machine EVERY time I try to run it.  So like any geek I go check out Adobes KnowledgeBase and find an article which seems to desrcribe what it happening.  It says that the best thing to do is to delete the preference files that it creates and it should work.

Thats great!!! Except that because the damn thing won’t even start it hasn’t created any preference files.  So I put in a support call to adobe.  They tell me to check out the KB article which i’ve just looked at.  They say it will work if I do that.  HELLO!!!! I beg to differ.  So if I managed to get it working I’ll let you know, but i’m not holding my breath.

So, last week I opened my quaterly package from Microsoft which contained Vista Business and Office 2007.  I’ve been playing with Vista Beta 2 for months now, so I thought I had it sorted.  How much different could it be, it seemed that Beta 2 was pretty stable and had most of the final bits on it - or so I thought.

Friday night was spent installing the upgrade from XP.  After 3 hours of trying, my first impression is “Vista sucks”.  It seems that if anything crashed whilst you were logged in, you couldn’t then log out and shut down.  So I was forced to on more than one occasion kill the machine and re-boot.  By 11pm I’d had enough and went to bed.

Saturday morning I approached it with a new view.  I imediatly re-installed the upgrade, which in this edition won’t let you perform a clean install, rather you have to install it over a copy of XP.  But it was looking better than Friday night.  The main problem I found was that too many bits of my hardware still don’t have Vista drivers ready for them, so I spent most of the morning realising that my MoBo maker (Asus) had no drivers for Vista, Creative had only Beta Drivers for Vista and so on.

The final thing I want to moan about today is Windows Live Messenger.  It doesn’t work!!!  8.1 crashes your machine and then you get the problems mentioned earlier.  So at the moment, I don’t have Messenger on my machine to use.

I can see there are some good reasons to upgrade to Vista, the sidebar for one is very useful, but until they get the driver issues sorted it won’t be having a place on my main PC.