Vista 101
Yesterday I gained a new member of the family. Yes, a dear member of the family will be passing on, and I now have his shiny new replacement. In non-geek speak… I got a new computer.
In all fairness, the old laptop is now going to Tegan (my younger sister). and it was a loyal help for the past… oh at least five years. But the hard drive was small by modern standards, the display was painfully cramped when trying to do anything useful (Photoshop, anyone?), the CD drive was about shot… and the dumb thing would overheat unless I had it on a desk, propped up, with a fan blowing directly underneath. No wireless, nothing.
So now I have this shiny new laptop. Three times as much memory, twice as much screenular real estate, huge hard drive, and I’m over the moon. There’s only one setback… Windows Vista.
I’m a complete Mac fangirl and an XP loyalist, so I was expecting to loathe Vista right from the get-go. But you know what? It’s not so bad.
I mean, the “are you SURE you want to run this program??” gets kinda old fast. The sidebar is annoying and the folder structure takes some getting used to. I only opened IE7 long enough to get Firefox fast, but the five minutes I spent in there weren’t as bad as I thought it should have been. Things install quickly. Drivers are found automatically. You can change the background color in Solitaire. Everything is bright, friendly, and looks very polished and well-designed.
So yes, you heard it here, from a girl who swore she’d never switch from XP unless it was straight to OSX… Vista is not as bad as they say.
I just turned off User Account Control and said screw it. Endless button clicking is not my idea of a good user interface. But, all in all, many of Vista’s flaws were apparently fixed in SP1 and I’ve been able to adapt to it without really hating it anymore than I hated XP when I first migrated from Windows Ancient.
Just for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfetbidVUYw
I’ve been using Vista on my laptop since…what, March last year? Took me about a week to get accustomed to it, then it was fine. I find it hard to go back to using XP now, because I’m so used to Vista shortcuts.
Yeah, Vista is pretty much nothing like the Windows-haters make it out to be. It’s not the greatest thing to ever hit a PC but then, neither was XP and yet we’ve come to love it.
The driver problems (i.e. - nonexistent drivers) weren’t their fault but the fault of lazy software/hardware manufacturers. Of course, MS takes the blame. Nothing new there. About 95% of driver issues were taken care of within the first 4 months. The anti-hype, lives on.
You mentioned the constant popups checking to see if you still remember what the hell you were trying to do before all the popups. Hahaha, honestly I find it rather amusing and totally worth the extra 3 minutes per day of clicking “yes, damnit… YES!!!” But you can always just turn them off, or better yet, configure them to only alert you of serious problems.
I’m sorry, I’m not going to make many friends with what I’m about to say, but screw it - IE7 is fantastic. OK, that said, no, it’s not as quick as FF3 or as extension-able either. BUT it does render pages ALMOST to perfect web standards and, from the perspective of a web designer, that means a lot! I still choose to use FF3 but kudos to MS for finally giving a crap about their browser and making a competitive one at that. Lookout for IE8 too, btw. It’s going to tell FF3 to “shut up, and sit down.” Believe it.
Got problems with the sidebar? Join the club. Google Desktop does a sidebar too. That one blows as well. Easily turned to the OFF position. Color changes in solitaire…. and to think you doubted Vista.
So there you have it - my extremely long comment as usual. I should probably get a blog. I’m good at this writing thing.
Vista, FTW! (even though I still have XP) ;p