! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.
The insurance company finally paid out on my broken laptop so I’ve finally been able to get a replacement.
It’s a nice bit of kit but it came with Vista, Microsoft’s most controversial operating system so far. I’ve read and heard good and bad reports of Vista but so far I quite like it.
After a couple of days playing with Vista, here are some pro’s and con’s:
Pro’s
- It looks nice. If you’re going to be staring at a computer you want it to look nice and with the Aero theme it’s the best looking version of Windows yet.
- The sidebar. I know these have been around for ages and I’ve tried one or two but they don’t compare to one that’s integrated with the operating system and the radio player gadget I found it the dogs danglies.
- The Windows Switcher. Pressing Win+Tab instead of Alt+Tab gives you the nice task switcher. Again, it’s just eye candy but it’s something nice to look at.
- The “Games” menu. Vista recognises lots of games and instead of adding them to the start menu it adds them to a nice Games menu which gives you the performance rating for your own machine and the required and recommended ratings for the game.
Con’s
- Age of Empires 3 doesn’t work. It’s quite a recent game and a Microsoft game at that. Is it too much to ask that a recent Microsoft game works with their latest operating system?
- Start Menu. The new start menu sucks ass. It’s all so confined with scroll bars and if you choose the “classic” start menu you get some antiquated Windows 2000-esque affair.
- Memory hungry. Just displaying the Desktop needs about half a gig of RAM.
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I struggled very much with my Vista laptop. I agree I like the visual look, but i had trouble depending on which view you looked at, it said I didn’t have access to my documents and pictures etc… I sorted it out eventually by deleting all the links that didn’t work, but it was very frustrating to start with. I have to admit I still like XP better.
I think it also has a few oddities, set as defaults?
One click to open a file and such things?