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Vista vs. Julian. Round 2.

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After the last round when I retired bowed and bloody but vowing to continue, I decided that I needed proper (not beta) video divers for the Toshiba M200 tablet. So I waited and waited and waited. Toshiba themselves had decided that the M200 wasn't on their list of supported machines for Vista, but I hoped to get a driver directly from NVIDIA.

No such luck: once NVIDIA had released their official drivers for Vista and the GEForce Go 5200 was not in the list, I realized that the Tosh was going to remain a Windows XP (Tablet PC Edition) machine for the rest of its life.

So the only thing for it was to buy a new laptop, one that had Vista already installed. No faffing around with drivers for me: the manufacturer would be responsible for all that worry. But which one? I started to monitor the e-coupons and to check the manufacturers sites. Dell, Gateway, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, HP, I looked at them all.

The biggest question to answer first was to tablet or not to tablet. It was hard: I did like the tablet I had, but came to realize that over the past year of working for Developer Express, I really hadn't used the tablet part at all. In my previous job, I would undock it and go to meetings and jot down notes, but with DX, I don't have any of that: all meetings are via Skype conference calls. In practice I was hardly undocking it at all, and when I did I didn't really use the pen at all.

Consequently a tablet was out and a standard laptop was in. Nevertheless, I really liked the weight of the M200: nice and light. The battery duration tended to suck, even after I'd bought a new battery. So my next laptop had to be light and with great battery power.

After many pricing sessions with various web sites, I decided to go for the Dell XPS M1210. Not only that but also fully loaded, as they say in car showrooms. 2.23 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM at 667 MHz, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400, 160GB 7200rpm hard disk, CD/DVD burner, Bluetooth, a/b/g WiFi, 9-cell battery (plus spare). And Windows Vista Home Premium, not that that would stay long on the machine: I had Vista Ultimate all ready to go.

It took two days to build and two days to deliver (over a weekend, unfortunately), and suddenly it was there on the Monday last week in all its (small) glory. And did I say light, even with the 9-cell battery plugged in the back? Yes, it was light.

And it all worked. I could plug in my external monitor and it came up and I could move windows around both screens. Beautiful.

Step 1 was installing Vista Ultimate. I slipped the DVD into the drive and it upgraded my Vista Home Premium to its big brother. More beauty.

Step 2 was uninstalling the things I didn't want. Dell gives you the option whether to install antivirus, ISP offers, etc, etc. I'd said no, and so the usual crapola wasn't there, but I didn't want the Dell-badged frou-frou either. So it got uninstalled.

Step 3 was to start installing all the software I can't seem to do without. I started off with Office 2007. No problems. I was just about to start installing Visual Studio 2005, when I noticed...

...there was no bloody sound. The audio was not working. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch was coming out of the Dell's speakers. I stared in horrified fascination: the sound had been working when I got the machine — I'd tried the buttons on the front edge — but after upgrading to Vista Ultimate, nothing. Panic, moi? Nope, I unwrapped the Dell driver disk, slipped it in and installed the audio driver afresh. It all worked again. Just a weird occurrence, nothing to worry about, right?

I continued installing. Here's a quick table of stuff I've installed with notes (the list is alphabetical, but isn't the order I installed them).

Now for the real horror story. The story started earlier on when "it" disappeared entirely, but the second chapter brought more issues, and the third chapter was even worse. To put it mildly, "it", the audio, sucks. I don't know whether it is Vista or whether it is the audio hardware in the XPS, or both, but, man, have I lost hours to this crap.

The first problem was the audio "going away" after I upgraded to Vista Ultimate. A simple re-install fixed the issue, but I'm not sure why upgrading to Vista Ultimate broke it in the first place.

Next up was the Kensington Notebook Expansion Dock (K33239) I'd ordered with the XPS. I was used to my Toshiba docking station carrying all the connections and wanted something similar for my new XPS. I plugged it into the XPS and Vista loaded all the drivers fine. I plugged in my speakers into the dock and, you guessed it, no sound. More choice phrases. I went online and found out that the drivers loaded automatically didn't work, and there were newer ones to download. OK, I did that, and lo, there was sound and everything was good at Bucknall Towers.

For a while.

After a couple of unpluggings of the dock itself and plugging in some USB devices into the dock, suddenly I had no sound again. The drivers were the right ones, but nothing doing. I unplugged everything from the dock but the speakers. Still no sound. To this day (a week later), I can get no sound out of these drivers or this dock.

Fine, bugger it. I unplugged the dock and put it to one side. For now it was just too irritating. I just plugged the speakers directly into the XPS. And lo, there was sound again, and Bucknall Towers resounded to the music of New Order.

Then a couple of days ago, I had some audio recording to do for a screencast. No problem, just plug the mic into the line-in jack on the XPS and away we go. Except the level was way too low. And I mean, waaaay too low compared to the Toshiba. I futzed and played around with settings and dials (I use a tube pre- amp and a pro mic). I dinked with the audio driver settings and with Audacity. But, in the end, I had to set the gain way too high in order to get a clear recording of my voice and of course at that point all the background noise was amplified as well. I recorded a screencast and all I could hear in the gaps between words was the hum in the background.

At this point, I really feel like screaming. This is effing ridiculous. Am I supposed to keep my old machine going to do some recordings? I'm guessing the XPS audio hardware is pretty awful (SigmaTel are you listening? Your hardware is crap.), but that doesn't let Vista off the hook.

Since I absolutely must record, today I decided to go for a professional external audio mixer, the M-Audio FastTrack USB, and cut the crappy SigmaTel audio hardware out of the picture. The FastTrack USB is ostensibly for recording guitar music (it was hilarious answering their customer survey: I hadn't heard of any of the magazines they mentioned, and, no, I didn't think having a professional guitar player present would help my recording sessions), but it comes with a XLR mic input for professional mics, and you can play audio through it. And it connects via USB. And its Vista drivers work. And it was another $100 I shouldn't have had to spend, but at this stage, it's working, the sound is as clear as a bell and I get a new recording application to play around with.

So all in all, in this round, despite fielding some pretty hefty punches, I think I've come out on top. Round 2 to me. Ding!

But it's not over yet...