So I've been trying to use Vista as my primary OS on my laptop this week. However, since I heard grumblings about XP Product Key deactivation it went on my secondary hard drive which had previously had Zod (Fedora Core 6) on it. That got wiped and my old copy of Win2kPro went on, to be immediately upgraded to Vista. Happily it did a fresh install, but left a lot of 2k cruft around. So here's my opinion of Vista after a few days of use.
1) No PNGs for desktop backgrounds? Are you frickin' kidding me? Argh. That would be a feature removal from XP. Quite annoying.
2) UAC. I tried. Really. I tried to keep it on. But holy Hades in a halfshell... Windows Needs My Permission to any little damned thing at all. Not only that, but I don't trust it. I trust SpyBot's TeaTimer to protect me more than UAC. So after running it for a week, and clicking allow buttons more times than I count, I've given up on that. I wish it was a per-user setting, just in case someone else used my box. But of course not that would have been a handy feature.
3) Open-Apple-Tab is really cool.
4) I hate - HATE! - not being able to set the Start Menu up the way I want it. Since Win2k, I've been sorting my start menu and renaming things so that I can hit Open-Apple-P-A-N for Notepad, Open-Apple-P-O-W for Word, Open-Apple-P-D-V-5 for Visual Studio 2k5, Open-Apple-P-D-P for Python, etc. Without fail, I am faster and more efficient than 90% of the people I know when navigating around on the computer and getting things running because of this. The new Search box embedded into the Start menu destroys my ability to do so and worse annoys the crap out of me. Happily, though, since the last beta, you can revert to a Classic start menu and not lose the other Aero visual enhancements. Yay.
5) Sitting here idle with nothing running, the CPU routinely takes up around 13% of the CPU, but I've seen it spike up to 40%. What in the hell is it doing while doing nothing? My XP box with several apps open (but doing nothing) only take up between 1% and 4%. I don't like that at all.
6) I thought the Battery and Speaker icons in the task bar hadn't yet been drawn out when I played with the last beta, but nope, they are supposed to look cheesy and white like that I guess... WTF were they thinking? Any why the several extra pixels on the left of the battery icon?
I have yet to actually do too much with VB6, and VS2k2, 2k3, and 2k5. I've heard gumblings that the latter doesn't work too well. (????!?!?) We'll see.
Posted: Wednesday, 9:51am | Topic: /Rants
