Retrophobic

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.