I was trying to get Diablo 2 to run under WINE in Ubuntu, but the version that I downloaded from the Blizzard store wouldn’t install.  I was unable to get past the license agreement because the Agree button was grayed out even after scrolling all the way down the page.  So I instead installed it on an XP guest in Virtual Box.

The only problem I had there was that VirtualBox does not support 3D acceleration, so I was getting a Direct3D error when I tried to play the game. This was solved by opening the Registry Editor, going to:

HKEY_Current_User/Software/Blizzard Entertainment/Diablo II/VideoConfig

and setting the Render value to 0. It opened just fine after that, and ran suprisingly quickly for being run inside a virtual machine.

My photos are slowing being destroyed. How? I’m not entirely sure. But I’ve noticed that ever since I upgraded to Vista, my photos have been getting corrupted randomly. I’ll be browsing through them and notice that some have turned funny colors, or have lines through them, or a myriad of other distortions. And I’m not the only one. There’s a whole thread on Microsoft Technet of people complaining about the same problem.

I would bet that Vista is trying to add some kind of information (maybe some kind of tag? a reference to the thumbnail?) to the files and on some it just fouls them up. Really though, it doesn’t matter why, it’s still completely unacceptable to have my precious photos/memories screwed up by a piece of buggy software.  Oh, and it’s not just the photos either.  It seems as though several programs and iso files that I’ve been storing have been getting corrupted.

Also, I don’t know why, but most of my games seem to run a lot slower in Vista then they did with XP. And that’s with Aero turned off and only basic services starting. There’s no reason for it. I do not have a slow machine by any means.

Add to that the fact that while Vista looks nice, things have been shuffled around ridiculously. For example, it takes like 5 clicks and three different screens to get to where you can see your network connections. It only took 1 in XP.

Screw it. When I get home, I’m putting XP back on so I can be happy again.

EDIT:

I’m back in XP and my TF2 framerate went from an average of 25 in Vista to an average of 45…with higher settings even.  I cannot figure that out.