Vista - Experience Pain
So, I got a new notebook... Acer Aspire 5580. A nice piece of hardware with Core 2 Duo, GeForce 7300 and 2GB of RAM. Not too bad, considering that I need to use M$ Office :)
So HW is nice, but I could not find ANY notebook that I could buy with Windows XP. I just had to get one with Vista and this already scared me at the beginning. Every shop was showing me how good is Vista, that it can play DVD and also run videoconferencing AT THE SAME TIME!!! :)
Anyway... I am disappointed. Vista gives me nothing that XP was not giving me, but gives me headache.. HW is good enough but the system (bare and clean!) is constantly messing with HDD even being idle and with 2GB of RAM. IE7 crashed on me a few times... so replaced it with Firefox.
There is nothing in Vista that I can consider better than XP. Even the "Start" menu has been messed to hell by removing icons next to items there. It is fairly intuitive to look at icons not reading items names. Every side of Vista brings disappointment. However, I could live with it... if it was slightly slower than XP. But this is just a snail. M$ gives me no choice than to get the old XP install I had with my old notebook and install it over Vista. Maybe I will run into problems with drivers because all the drivers on Acer website seem to be targetted at Vista already....
Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes....
I would do better by donating cash to Steve Jobs for his overexpensive MacBook and run OSX.
The only good side of this puchase is hardware. The housing feels good, stable, light. The keyboard is of correct size and feels perfect for typing and the LCD is perfect for my eyes.
I felt like I didn't need to
I felt like I didn't need to change from 2000 to XP at the time.. but eventually one has to move on.
I haven't tried Vista yet. One thing I surely don't like is how it cripples Google Desktop.. a known issue that will be fixed in a later service pack.
Other than that.. I don't really need much from an OS.
One thing I really wish it was solved is to keep track of currently and frequently used folders and files across different application. This is something that Boomerang on old Macs did nicely.
Nowadays I use Google Desktop (Double CTRL) to search for pieces of recent filenames to bring the containing folder.. but it doesn't always work well. In fact Google Desktop seems to give priority to file contents rather than to pathnames, which is a shame !
wooo
Drivers
Problem with new operating systems is that one needs sooner or later move because there will be no more new drivers for old hardware and new hardware comes only with drivers for current OS. That's a pain unless one wants to live with Linux which basically supports only obsolee hardware :)
I just hope that I can get this new notebook running with XP because Vista really sucks. The more I use it the worse impression I get everywhere. It's just candy, gummi thing but nothing beneath. I wonder why M$ spent 6bn on this because there is really nothing new and good.
I dunno.. I think all
I dunno.. I think all programmers are fucked !
Programming wasn't meant for the human brain... we keep struggling.
Doing a piece of software like Vista nowadays is a great achievement by itself... who cares if it actually is any useful 8)
Cynic!
Doing a piece of software like Vista nowadays is a great achievement by itself... who cares if it actually is any useful
Ooooh ... nice comment there. Too bad it's cost folks $$$ to use this great achievement! 8P They should have just given it away for free! I know I'll be (eventually) upgrading to Vista. No choice ... most of my hardware @ hold is an aging AGP system, etc. I know that when I finally get a new PC, it's with Vista ... so I'm waiting for the service pack patch.
it's nice
I've been using Vista since early betas, and made the final move back in December. I think it's great, really great. There are some annoyances but I can live with them. Once you get used to it, it's really much better and convenient than XP could ever be.
Btw, I guess you've already downloaded chipset and video drivers etc? or are you using the vista/brand supplied ones? Also disable offline files service and windows defender, that helps a lot. You can also set a lower profile for search indexing in power options. Once most stuff is indexed it's much faster.
Thinks I like:
- customizable folder/places shortcuts to the left of windows explorer, I can't live without that anymore
- Aero!!!!!!!! It's not the candy stuff (not like it's anything great anyway compared to beryl.. the gfx stuff), but the whole thing.. it makes everything way more stable and faster to access. When you boot up and vista is still loading stuff you can already use the start menu and launch other applications as smooth as if everything was already loaded.
- games: actually some are slower, but switching from full screen to desktop is a bliss now, it's fast and smooth and doesn't feel like the whole thing's gonna crash or freeze
- previous folder navigation on the address bar, I love this! it's like.. "C > folder 1 > folder 2 > whatever > folder 3, you can just click on any of them and also get a list of the subfolders from any of those in a list
- audio: it's nice being able to mute individual applications completely from the sound mixer
- video preview thumbnails and big preview on bottom bar. While I use ListView/Sort by type mostly, the preview thumbnail options for pics and videos are quite nice and far improved since XP.
- start menu: I love this. just type in the app name "skype" "msn" .. you name it, it will find it and launch it
- gadgets! there's a lot of convenient stuff for that bar to the right. I have a few on all the time: home and tokyo weather, USD and YEN currency exchange, network throughoutput, cpu and ram usage, and a panel with links to apps and any files with icons.
- clocks: you can add additional clocks and they are shown as hint. I have tokyo time there :p
- date: the date viewer is nice, love how it goes back to selectable months and years upon click
- outlook express: the spam filtering is just great, most stuff is detected
- window previews: that preview from buttons on the taskbar of open apps. Also with alt-tab
- "open file location" for shortcuts and any files
- device manager: you can uninstall a device and have it delete all the driver files
- hardware recognition: I plugged my sony ericcson w900i to the usb to transfer some big files, vista instantly recognized it and added some drivers for it (besides it recognizing it as a removable drive right away)
- media player server thing.. it works nicely with PS3 as a media server (altho ps3 still won't play divx/xvid)
- readyboost: it really helps using my 4gb kingston stick (15-20 MB/s r/w). I can just remove it np whenever I want
- stability/smoothness, I can't say it enough times, it feels SMOOTH! (ok my computer isn't bad either though.. amd x2 4600+, 4gb ddr2-800 corsair ram, geforce 8800GTS, nforce5 mobo. good brand)
- file indexing: set it properly and it rocks. you can set any extensions, folders to scan, whether to scan contents or not, speed of indexing. the search feature is excellent
- folder security permissions: no need to get into safe mode to change them
- UAC: it's a total pita, so I just disabled that. but for normal users I think it's quite ok. my bro's new laptop has vista now, he hasn't got a virus yet for a few months, which is quite an achievement :p I'm sick of removing viruses from family computers
there's probably more that i'll remember later
things I dislike/bad things:
- 3d flip thing. it's just useless.. that 3d view of windows with win+tab
- sometimes folders forget the sort type/view you had them on, so you have to go sort/and pick type from a long list of like 100 sorting options. I can't live without listview/type for sorting files
- drivers: most drivers are ok besides 2 things im missing: asus bluetooth dongle.. they are just ignoring it, fuck asus; terratec soundcard: it's a german company, the card is amazing but they suck at making proper drivers, at time, well featured etc, it's still in beta and causes bsods sometimes.
- speed in games: some games are slower, but that'll be fixed with new drivers etc eventually
Well, that's basically it!
Give it time, it will eventually rock.
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