NOVAM & Vista

I've been checking bus stop data that was loaded from the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database, donated by the Department for Transport. Christoph Böhme has created a viewer called NOVAM and kindly added a colour scheme based on my choice. You can see it here. I wanted to try it with IE since the people in council Transport Offices will probably use IE.

My laptop came with Vista. I loaded a dual boot Ubuntu which I use all the time. To try out IE I restarted the machine in Vista. I haven't used Vista for weeks, so the virus checker had expired. I decided to delete it and add a free one. Whilst doing this the Windows update process had downloaded umpteen updates so I foolishly agreed to install them. I had installed the Thunderbird profile on a folder on the Windows NTFS drive so I could use email on both Windows and Ubuntu and see the same messages etc. That was my downfall. At some point windows must have hibernated, I didn't realise, restarted the PC in Ubuntu, did some stuff in Thunderbird, then restarted in Vista. Vista now recovered my running email to the way it had been and threw away my newly downloaded emails.

Now I haven't lost much, but it has just been the last straw. I hate hibernation, but it doesn't seem easy to turn off in Vista - part of the Micro$oft policy of we know best, we'll take your PC that you paid your money for and make it work our way even if you don't like it. So Vista is no more and how good does that feel.

I do have another PC (well a few actually) and there is XP on one of them, so I'm not without access to Windows, so now I can try NOVAM in IE which I didn't actually get around to in Vista in the end anyway. I hope it works.