Windows Vista - A Powerful Winner!

So I’ve been running Vista Enterprise on a machine behind me for about two weeks. And of course – (if you know me this comparison will come as no surprise) it appears as Mac OS X did about four years ago. It works, and it’s sort-of pretty, and Office 2007 is just going to confuse the hell out of everyone when they start using it – unless they are a new user. Never mind that now the default file type is XML and not backward compatible with previous office versions. I digress. This is about something much simpler.

 

A photographer here at the paper brought me a 1 GB USB thumb-drive thingy. He had been using it on his Mac at home when the power went out. The event apparently fried the file system on it and it was now unusable on his Mac at home. He said he had tried Disk Utility to no avail. No matter what he did it was unusable.

 

“Well,” says I. “Let’s see what Vista will do with it!” I plug it in the USB port on the Vista box, and it immediately tells me it needs formatting. Ok. Let it format.

 

The format fails. I try a quick format. Nope. I try ‘Disk Utilities’ under ‘Manage Computer’ and everything reports healthy – even though it’s not. So I use Disk Utilities to format it. Now the file system is gone – or is reported as RAW. I then think that maybe it has blown away the damaged file system and now I can format it ‘normally.’ Still fails.

 

I remove the USB thingy and plug it into a machine running Fedora Core 5.

 

From the terminal:

 

fdisk /dev/sdc1

delete partition

create partition

quit

mkfs /dev/sdc1

 

Plug it back in to the Vista box and everything is fine. I even reformat it from there just to be sure it wasn’t some anomaly.

 

Now that’s a powerful OS for media and music and photos and everything else consumers want to do at home. I can’t wait to trade in my Macs at home for this mighty OS.

 

Now I’m not saying his Mac at home handled it any better but I can’t verify what he did and didn’t try with the Mac’s Disk Utilities. I do wish I had a Mac here at work running OS X so I could have tried the same thing. I can’t help but think it would have worked just as well.

 

The photographer just walked by. “Works great, David. Thank you!”

 

Now all I have to do is make sure another newspaper gets out tomorrow. There’s no OS in the world that can do that.