I figure I owe it to Microsoft and everyone who reads my blog to tell my latest Vista story, and it's good.

I blogged a while back about problems I had with Vista and drivers, etc. I rely on 2 MOTU 24/IO audio interface units in the studio for my main machine, and I just had too many problems with the drivers. Sometimes the devices would just disappear from the system. When they were there they worked great, but I couldn't deal with the unreliability, so I took Vista x64 off my machine. It's a pity because everthing else about it was working fine, except for the well known file copy and hanging issues that everyone was having.

Anyway, my laptop recently died and I had to do a session the next day, so I went to Best Buy and bought the nicest laptop that they had in stock. First of all, all the laptops have Vista installed these days, so short of re-paving the machine when I got home, which I didn't have time to do, I was going to use Vista.

I chose a Toshiba Satellite and the price was right. Check this out. 4GB RAM, a 320GB HD. OK, it's 5400 RPM but hey, the storage is awesome and I don't need blazing HD speed on this puppy. It came with Vista 64-bit SP1. The screen is smaller than I'm used to and the graphics are limited but adequate for what I do with it. The maximum screen resolution is only 1280x800 but I had to get something they had in stock that was decent. The price was only $1299. That was a huge surprise. The Sony laptops were twice that.

So, the first thing I tried to do was to copy my 70 GB music library over to my laptop across a gigabit connection. Bad idea. It sat there thinking about copying for an hour before I hit the cancel button. I went out and got TeraCopy at the suggestion of one of the Regional Directors and I'm happy with that. I  must say though that for normal everyday file copying that problem is pretty much gone in Vista x64 SP1

I've started using the speech recognition features and I'm blown away. I wish there was an easier way to drive the browser with it, but you can't have everything. I also turned off IPv6 on all adapters. That was a good move, as that has been known to cause hangs and I don't use it. Of course I turned off that annoying User Access Control. The audio works great, and the built in photo viewer lets me run through my photos quickly, deleting bad ones and rotating those that need it, saving changes automatically. I love that.

So, I really have nothing to complain about. I love it. I would recommend this laptop with Vista 64 to anyone. I'd just want to tweak it a little before I handed one over to my kids or my mother. :)