Windows Vista is everyone's favorite tech punching bag, and not without reason. But the reviled operating system has some amazing potential and with some tweaks and a few utilities, you can do what Redmond didn't: make Vista great.
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Member since:2005-06-29
My biggest problem with Vista is with its assumption that I have a 20"+ monitor. I mean, the real-estate wasted should be getting environmentalists all riled up!
Strange. Windows Vista looks plain awesome and doesn't seem to waste anything on my Aspire One (8.9" 1024x600). I did revert to the old-fashioned start menu, but that's it. I always do that anyway (screw those overly complicated modern menus).
Little off-topic, but it just FLIES too (WITH full Aero Glass stuff). Thanks to the fancy real hard drive I put in there (1.8" ZIF Hitachi drive) - replacing the crappy SSD with this real hard drive, and installing Vista on it, turned this device from a fun gimmick into my main notebook.
Netbooks are teh awesome. I need more of them or else they'll die of starvation... THEY ARE SO DAMN LICKABLE.
Ahem.
Edited 2008-10-15 21:51 UTC
Member since:2006-11-08
Member since:2007-08-20
I did revert to the old-fashioned start menu
I always used to do that on Windows XP, but with Vista you're missing one of Vista's best UI improvements - fast, system-wide search. Press the windows key then type the first few letters of the app's name, then hit enter. That's usually all that's needed to launch apps from Vista's new start menu; 1 or 2 seconds max for me. You can launch command-line utils from it too, eg "ping google.com"; no need for the run dialog anymore. I've even added a 'shutdown' link to the start menu so I can type "<Windows key>shu<enter>" to shutdown; similarly for hibernate and reboot. A real time-saver and convenience, and the one thing I miss most on XP.
Too bad the search doesn't include firefox's bookmarks though...
Edited 2008-10-16 12:26 UTC
Member since:2006-11-08
Member since:2005-09-13
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Member since:
2005-07-24
I think the article would have been more aptly named: "Making Windows Vista Tolerable."
My biggest problem with Vista is with its assumption that I have a 20"+ monitor. I mean, the real-estate wasted should be getting environmentalists all riled up!
Another issue is in identifying how much memory is actually being used, the system should differentiate between "actual" allocations versus cache/buffer allocations. Y'know, like Ubuntu. Of course, this is really just a ProcessManager/whatever it's called ( brain fart ) thing .
UAC doesn't really bother me, I can see where Microsoft is coming from on that one, and the migratory mentality is needed for numerous reasons beyond Microsoft's control.
Of course, I just stick with the operating systems as follows:
BeOS Dano 5.1d0 - PhOS patched
MacOS X ( 10.4, I think ), jas patched
Windows XP SP3, heavily modified - of course
Ubuntu 8.0.4 - needs some work, it gots bugs
PhOS Dev-Serenity ( BeOS, Haiku, custom )
Haiku
With the exception of Haiku, all are selectable from the BeOS boot menu ( yeah, I'm that good :-) ). Haiku is installed on a solo 200GB SATA drive, and I swap it out for testing. The 200GB drive doesn't always have Haiku on it, sometimes it is a clone of my PhOS Dev-Serenity when I am ready to test critical drivers.
Hmm...
--The loon