You may recall how I commented on how hot my system has been getting while running Vista. Well, shortly before Christmas, it all proved to be a little too much for my Radeon 9800 Pro, which coughed, spluttered, and finally died a death from overheating. I'm now running with the on-board Intel 82865G chip in Vista basic mode - I lose all the pretty transparency, but the core temperature has dropped to acceptable levels and I no longer have to worry about Nathan burning his hands on the case. And to be honest, I really don't care whether the title bars are transparent, as long as the system is stable.
Stability, of course, is never easy to achieve in a first release of an operating system, and several little crashes here and glitches there have happened since installing Vista that can only be described as odd. The most annoying glitch is the fact that Vista insists that I have my pc connected to a monitor that can only display 1280 x 768, when in fact it can display 1366 x 768. It's our new Sony Bravia LCD telly that I'm using as a monitor at the moment, since I've packed all the other monitors, and it works just fine if you can convince the system that you can use the correct resolution. I did a load of searching online and on the Sony website to see if they provided drivers for the telly as a monitor, but of course they didn't. It turns out that Sony are not unique in this either, and it appears to be a problem with many other LCD televisions being used as monitors. In the end, I managed to find a funky little program called PowerStrip that enables you to create an .inf file for your monitor that you can use to obtain a more correct resolution (as well as doing a heck of a lot more funky stuff).
Not having a lot of time to play with the tool, I at least managed to read the EDID information from the telly's monitor port, which stated that it would be happy to display 1360 x 768 - I'm not going to argue about 6 more pixels in width (okay, 6 x 768, but you get my point - 1360 is way better than 1280!). So, to cut a long story short, by creating this file, 95% of the time the computer has booted up with the right resolution. Interestingly, I've not had to do this for my XP box, which always uses the correct resolution, as long as the telly is turned on and plugged in when the computer boots. Looks like XP is way better at reading EDID information than Vista.