"Waiter, there's a crow in my soup"

Since my nadir of frustration late last week, I've made steady and significant progress with Vista.

With only an exception or two, all of the problems I've experienced were due to my mistakes, incorrect settings, or Vista's fledging and teething process, which is accompanied by a lot of disk churning, windows and messages popping up, and background activity of one kind or another.

As with earlier versions of Windows, in certain situations Vista seems to need more than one reboot - perhaps several? - before certain key initialization routines and sequences are completed.

My original instincts about this process were correct, and it has taken Vista a while to sort itself out while it incorporates key dowloaded updates, establishes user preferences, absorbs newly installed software, and disk indexing, which had my hard drives chugging and churning for awhile. The payoff for all this disk activity is instant search results, but my box had 100GB and 120GB external drives to index in addition to the internal 100GB. It was a big job.

Because WinHlp386.exe is no longer included with Vista, older applications requiring this service - like my CorelDraw & Photopaint 10 from 2000 - will not be able to run their Help files. Otherwise, both these applications appear to run fine, with the peculiar single exception that I can't drag 'n' drop into Photopaint - a fairly serious but not fatal shortcoming. I know, it's time to upgrade, but I have Photoshop 7 too, and it appears to work flawlessly.

Haven't got around to installing or testing Max yet. Since I made the decision to repair the failed laptop, the urgency of that requirement has waned.

Flash appears to run beautifully under Vista. 'Dunno now why I thought it didn't.

I loaded and played UT2004. The game runs very smoothly with high frame rates. The onboard Intel graphics renders special shading and lighting effects a little less dazzlingly than my other machine's nVidia card, but the game runs noticeably quicker and smoother on this Intel T2060 than with my older Athlon 3400, which ran it well.

A significant disappointment is the Gateway's inability to run the Supreme Commander demo. Chris Taylor's long awaited offering wants a 1.8 GHz processor minimun, where the Gateways dual core spins at only 1.6

I've made big progress in the audio realm as well. I still can't record acoss the desktop, but Magix is fully functional, and even Cakewalk has come to life.

It's conceivable that this ability has been hamstrung to discourage illegal copying of music, but I'm grasping at straws at this stage.

The issues I'm still having with sound are very interesting. Burrowing into Device Mgr., I find the Sigma Tel High Definition Audio Codec at Location 0 on what's called the Internal High Definition Audio Bus. Sure enough, Sigma Tel Audio has a Control Panel, but its single tab is populated with a check box to enable power management, and that's about it.

Earlier, flipping and twiddling settings trying to bring the audio to life, I disabled the microphone. That was a mistake, because an hour of searching failed to reveal where I could re-enable it, and I had to revert to a system restore to get the mike back.

I've got to do some futher digging on this Sigma Tel business and that internal hi def audio bus.

Nevertheless, the fact that I'm now getting pretty decent sound from Magix and Cakewalk tells me that the Sigma Tel device is perhaps capable enough, if only I could find the right software switches to trip or stumble onto additional drivers. Stay tuned.

Another issue is the T2060 dual-core processor in this box. Not much info out there on it, but it's being used widely in OEM econoboxes like this new GW, and I've heard some people compare it to a dual-core Celeron because of its smaller 1MB L2 cache. Also noteworthy are numerous compaints about the trial bloatware attached to the GW box, but the consensus seems to be that these are capable little systems when the bloatware is banished, drivers are current, and the system has had a chance to settle down.

The Gateway is a lightweight, attactive little laptop machine. I paid $1295 for my first computer - a 16K Apple II+ with Applesoft by Gates & Allen, SupModR for TV display, and an accessory cassette recorder for loading and storing data. $1295.

The Gateway MT6705 was $650 out the door at Best Buy. In the time it's taken Saturn to orbit the sun, we've made some progress down here on Earth, at least when it comes to computers.

S