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Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Vista = XP
I've had the unfortunate dumb luck of experiencing Windows Vista from the very beginning and at this point it's no longer necessary to cling to XP:
Dell has taken a leading position in continuing to offer Windows XP.
Vista's bad reputation began because companies like Dell forced it on people and hardware that weren't ready for it. That's what happened to us: we wound up with a laptop loaded with Vista but not powerful enough to run it properly (at the time, Dell had discontinued the XP option). On a recent service call to Dell, they had the gall to tell us that the laptop -- the one they sold us -- wasn't powerful enough to run Vista properly. Gee, thanks ... idiots.
But I've been using Vista and running Adobe CS3 on a new desktop for the past two months and it's just fine. As a garden-variety user, I would say that Vista is about equivalent to XP; every improvement is countered by something annoying. The main irritant are those constant pop-ups. Vista can't do a thing without asking your permission and there's never a "don't ask again" option to save your preferences. It wears you down after giving permission to the same process for the gazillionth time.
One of the main "features" was the transparent glass effect on the windows. Even though my system is powerful enough to run the effects, I found it distracting and disabled it after a few weeks. Here's the benefit of having frosted glass windows: there is no benefit to having frosted glass windows.
But Vista looks better than XP. XP's chunky, colourful interface made it look too much like a kid's toy. Vsta also seems to do a much better job of recovering from crashed and hanging programs.
So now it's mostly a lateral move from XP to Vista. There's nothing to fear anymore ... but nothing all that great, either.
2:18 PM
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