For years and years now (since the first G4 iBooks), whenever someone asked me for advice about what laptop to buy, my standard answer was simple: get an Apple laptop. Doesn't matter which one. Apple was so far ahead of the competition it just wasn't funny anymore. This past weekend, though, marked the end of an era for me: for the first time, I advised someone to get an Asus ZenBook instead.
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Member since:2005-06-29
For me, it's the compositing. Windows XP has such horrible interface lag and graphical artefacts it makes me want to cut myself. Mind you, I switched from BeOS to Windows XP, so that sudden drop in fluidity, responsiveness, and smoothness may have scarred me for life regarding XP.
Sure, compositing is basically just a brute force approach to responsiveness (BeOS did it with good code and clean design), but it's better than nothing. I always wonder why Mac OS X always feels just a tad bit less responsive than Windows 7 - like somebody put sticky syrup underneath everything. It has compositing too, after all.
Edited 2012-03-28 08:39 UTC
Member since:2011-05-12
Well, XP would never win any beauty contest. Never mind the lag, just the looks made it not-so-fun to easy. Certainly if you're used to something like BeOS. Windows 2000 looked nicer.
And of course users (in an office environment) seem very keen to use desktop backgrounds using self-made pictures which are often out of focus, ugly and stretch them out of proportion or use the "fill" option to fill the screen with clones of smiling family members (of which a couple fall half of the screen edge).
But they and a lot of people don't seem to mind. I guess it's because they don't know any better. For a BeOS, Mac, Amiga, <anything else> I can imagine XP isn't very fun to look at.
To be fair, XP did have a very long run which is worth a compliment I guess.
Member since:
2011-05-12
We have 2 Windows 7 PCs at work, the rest is XP (and one Mac of course).
When I have to do something on an XP machine and the user doesn't have the permission things get nasty. I have to log out (close all their programs, files), log in as admin, log back in as the user. Stuff like "run as" only works with .exe files. It's very cumbersome.
Windows 7 just asks for an admin username/password, like OS X, and it works.
For me, personally, that's the Holy Grail.