This is part 1 of a 2 part article.
Part 2 here
I was bored. Terribly bored. Bored of Five years of the same goddamn desktop. The blue and the green and the supposed eye candy. I had kubuntu installed on another partition and was excited but I did something stupid and destroyed it.
I was pretty sure of not switching to linux because I liked windows, despite all the negative hype, and had hope that vista would have something interesting up it’s sleeve. Then, driven by the lack of things to do, I got a copy of vista rc2, 5744 for 64 bit and installed it, effectively destroying the installation of linux I’d ruined while playing around a few days back.
The installation was more or less straightforward except for the partitioning, which was absolutely terrible. Despite the eye candy, I had difficulty finding the disk/partition options to allow me to format it, which didn’t give me any warning about the data that’s being erased. It didn’t make it clear which hard drive and label of the partition that’s being erased. But five years of installing various operating systems(9 linux distros, win-all and macosx) allowed me to figure out what’s to be done, but… unfortunately might not be for most other people. Now that it was done, before I knew it, installation began. No double triple warning like xp installation. That kindof pissed me off. and it told me the minimum size for a hard drive is 15gb. I had to format my nearby swap partition to just reach 15 gb and let it install.
After what seemed like ages I was at the desktop. ‘Pretty impressive’ I thought to myself. Two completely useless sidebar widgets one for the time and a scratch pad. I had trouble looking for drivers when none of my drivers installed. For some reason all the alpha blending worked and the directX version was 10. Apparently vista used some generic driver and sound and networking worked fine. Though still there seemed to be some problem with the hardware and I downloaded the 88.61 forceware drivers from nvidia but that failed to work. I got my music up and running in media player 11 which is more impressive than meda player 10 but sucks ass compared to amaroK.
Things I liked about vista.
1. Improved File management system. It’s a little easier with favourite links and I like what they did to the address bar which is, in my opinion, shamelessly copied from nautilus.
2. Network Configuration: Hats off to microsoft for a brilliant network and sharing manager, which diagnosed my internet problems as a bad proxy connection(like I didn’t know that) I had to go the same extreme depth to configure the proxy(to think they’d have made it easier)
3. The speed: To my surprise, visa isn’t as slow as I thought it’d be. Mostly because of my comparitively bleeding edge hardware and my supercool super powerful graphics card. But also, yes, it does work faster.
4. Disk caching: I found that my free ram was 2mb. I freaked and was about to shut down and figured out it might be similar to what I used to have in linux, and yes, it was a disk cache, another seemingly liftoff from linux.
5. Indexing and media gathering: The user folder is more accessible. And all media is together, though my 21gb music collection won’t fit in this partition.
6. Media Center: I loved it. It was pathetic and as useless as dead dung beetles, but I loved it nevertheless. IT hogged my whole screen and put all my album artwork in a really neat pile allowing me to search, though using it in daily life is gonna be a big problem.
7. System Benchmarking: Vista assigns a score to your computer which helps you choose software, which is mainly balderdash, but interesting. I’ve never bought software based on a single rating. All games have a low graphics mode and the minimum system requirements are pretty cheap nowadays.
But all of the above(except maybe in the file management, can be done in xp. And definitely allp can be topped in linux)
New features which I found absolutely useless:
1. The themes: I’ve been studying digital asthetics for a few months and I can guess that this is not the bes that can be done and microsoft should’ve shipped atleast 10 more themes.
2. Aero: It’s of obviously good, but what for. I like the windows flipping by but who’d want to pay so much for that. Also, if you do, how many days will you go before it becomes “just another thing”. All the pretty effects and the ui is not important after a while.
3. Shadow system and backing up: Fine, there might be a time when I want to revert back a file that I “accidentally” modified. Now is that worth making previous copies or whatever of every fricking file on the disk.
4. The control panel: While hoping to be more helpful and intuitive, I had to struggle to find slightly more advanced options. All vista does is put ten crappy settings a baby knows how to change and makes it supposedly intuitive. I still haven’t figured out how to disable the file shadow thing.
What you’ll be paying $300(average upgrade=260/fresh=400) for:
1. a new, fine, let’s admit it, pretty theme, where windows fade in and out and fly around when you want them to.
2. A simple photo organizer and video maker and a simple mail application.
3. A simple system benchmarking tool.
4. A better file organizing software.
5. A welcome center which helpfully allows you to buy more microsoft stuff.
6. Windows XP(more or less)
Hope that puts things a bit more in perspective.
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