Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

I actually failed to realize just how neat Vista Ultimate is. I’ve had the new pc for a few months now (Dell XPS) and all its quad core glory. It wasn’t until this past weekend when I was sitting down getting it setup as my new development PC that I realized it had IIS 7 with ability to create multiple websites & multiple FTP sites. I was a little surprised at that fact as I’d have thought it would be reserved solely for the Windows Server family as was the case with IIS 6 for Server 2003 compared to the version I was using on XP Pro. So after a few clicks, some firewall modifications, and a couple choice words later I had my six websites setup and configured. Unfortunately it wasn’t until I tried to switch over this blog engine until I realized that a lot changed between IIS versions.

Anyway, long story short (props out to Ck) a buddy of mine pointed out some conversion issues, and I was able to resolve it after about five hours of head banging confusion. Dang you and the new web.config setup dealing with http handlers. So the site is live (RampidByter.com) after about a five month hiatus, my new system has been converted into a web server / development system, and of course I’m now having some new strange problems.

I ran Windows update just yesterday on the Vista PC, and installed the recommended NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX drivers. Wouldn’t you know it, now periodically the system will drop the screen, goes totally black, and then will come back to the desktop saying my video driver has failed but was restarted.

Man, can’t win with you Vista. That was one thing I liked about XP Pro it didn’t fail on the things I most rely on working without question. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t unstable, but at least it didn’t give me the impression that things broke all the time. So I’d run visual studio, make a web page, switch to design view, black screen, error message on the status bar, or I’d open media player while buiding the web page… back to black.

I guess Vista is an exception to the rule. Once you go black (Vista), you go back (XP).