Vista 1st Impressions

Well I have had my new Gateway laptop for a few weeks now. If you want to know how I feel about Vista, I'll just tell you that within the SAME DAY I installed Windows XP in dual-boot mode. Why you say? Well I was in Vista, downloading 2 programs and install 1 when my system froze up. That's within the first 2 hours of having this thing on, it froze up with a Explorer error. I was doing practically nothing!

So I found that great site referencing how to dual-boot XP w/Vista. Loaded my XP up on the box and have happy ever since. I decided that Vista needed to stay, I really would like to explore its capabilities more, but I gain the functionality of XP. Oh yes, and SPEED! Man, Vista is not very fast. The first thing I noticed when I booted up to XP was how much faster it is. Not good Microsoft, not good.

So my recommendations? Go ahead and buy that Vista box, and go ahead and get a copy of XP and load um' up. Its very easy and straight forward to dual-boot together. You get the best of both worlds.

Stop making excuses, get out and observe!

I have a 8″ Celestron Ultima 8 PEC Schmidt-Cass telescope that I have owned since about 1995. This scope has brought me many enjoyable nights of observing, whether at a outreach public observing session, or at our club’s dark-sky observing site. I started to make up any number of excuses for not going out and observing during the weeknights because of trees obscuring most of my sky, light pollution, my scope is just too big and bulky, my optics are not world-class, yada yada. For the last 6 months, I haven’t used my scope at all from home for these reasons. But the strangest excuse is when I started to blame the telescope. Now I’m an equipment freak, I love to read about new telescopes, their reviews etc. I keep reading in magazines about a variety of instruments from computer goto SCT’s and MCT types to the more portable high-end retractor’s. Even the big light buckets, you name it. I kept trying to convince myself that if I had one of those telescopes, then I would observe more ofter.

Well thats bull. I decided that although having a more portable scope would be nice, and sure, who wouldn’t like a goto scope or a 12″ dob? But my scope is darn good, and there just isn’t a valid excuse NOT to get out and start observing! What has help me rejuvenate my enthusiasm to “Just Observe It”? Check back soon!