Vista - Cancel or Allow?

Chuck got an evening's worth of laughs last night when I decided on a whim to format my XPS gaming laptop and install Windows Vista instead. Starting with the format -- it kept insisting on "upgrading" me when I wanted a clean, formatted install. Booting from the DVD, finally it behaved and let me format my partition before installing Vista.

Once up and running in Vista, it decided to ask me a question for every darn thing I was doing on the machine. "Cancel? Allow. Cancel? Allow. Cancel? Allow." Quickly (and a few expletives later) I managed to get my fingers on the "Turn off User Account Control settings" (of course "not recommended"). Turn off. Reboot. Yay.

Then it was a matter of turning off every other "Are you reaaaaaaaally sure you want to do this" confirmation dialog box I could find over the course of the next hour and a half.

So I've spent today doing mass installs, and so far everything has gone relatively smoothly except for Acrobat Reader 8, which insists that you have User Account Control RUNNING to write to the temp directory. Grr. Turned UAC back on, installed, turned UAC back off, reboot.

Aside from Vista being incredibly "pretty" and OSX-like, I haven't found an advantage yet. Will keep running it to assess further havoc I can wreak on the OS.

Breckenridge

Just got back yesterday afternoon from our fantastic ski vacation in Breckenridge. We flew to Denver on Thursday and then drove from Golden, CO to Breckenridge, CO on Friday morning. With a blizzard swift on our tail, we arrived in Breckenridge around 8:30am Friday morning. The state closed down I-70 about an hour after we arrived because the roads were becoming impassable. We *just* made it!



Had a blast on the slopes Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I snowboarded all day Friday and switched to skis for Saturday and Sunday. As much as I adore boarding, it's harder on my quads than skiing is. My goal for next year will be to snowboard two days and ski one. It's great to rent skis just to hang with the same ski friends we have anyway -- makes for a fun day.

We're going to hopefully get one more ski weekend in this season at either Snowbowl or Sunrise Ski Park and do more snowboarding. Then this May I'm planning to pick up a snowboard, boots, and bindings at the end of the season.

Back to work this week -- now it's catchup time :P