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January 22, 2009
Vista ... hiss, boo ... wait, what?
I've been using Vista for nearly a week now, necessitated by the theft of my old (Windows XP) machine. For months I've been railing against Microsoft's hegemony, about the waste of resources that Vista's relentless polling of device drivers represents, about the horror stories that people have told me about problems with software compatibility and so on and so forth. To my surprise, after a week, I'm finding I actually quite like it. Of course, XP would run like the wind on this machine, with its 2.1GHz Turion dual cores and 3Gb of RAM. And, frankly, the UAC is like having a well-meaning but condescending uncle standing at your shoulder: "Are you sure you should be doing that? Do you know who that is? Should you really be talking to them?". It can be irritating running some "legacy" software - Delphi 7 for example (although at six years old, and still perfectly useable, I hate calling it "legacy" as if it's from the 19th century). There's a tendency for some icons to disappear from the system tray - the OpenVPN GUI, for example, hides like a scared rabbit if I close the lid and resume, and press "cancel" instead of reconnecting to my VPN, meaning I have to open task manager, hunt the rabbit down and shoot it in the head before resurrecting it. Sorry, that got a bit Gothic, didn't it? But there are some nice touches - I like the sidebar, and having the Bluetooth modem as standard is a nice touch - I grappled with that for a long time under XP. And I like Aero - the visual task switching is very nice, and something that PowerToys under XP tried to do, but didn't quite work with IE sessions. No, on balance, I can get used to Vista. I'll be sorry to say goodbye to XP. I know it was getting a bit long in the tooth, but every year it got more stable. I have a newer. prettier flame now, even if she thinks 2002 is a long time ago.
Posted by daen at January 22, 2009 09:28 AM
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