OK, so I’m sure everyone knows that I am “not exactly a big fan of Windows.” We have all heard it before, so I won’t dwell on it. At this point, I am about 90% Windows free. Most of that, however, is for work. The Novell network stuff still relies on Windows for basic management. The current version of ConsoleOne (Netware administrator) is written in Java and actually runs better on my Linux box then it does on any Windows machine I have tried. So I still run Windows XP in a VMware desktop on my Gentoo box. I’ve come to find a small warm spot in my heart for XP, almost enough to call it “not too terribly bad.” Don’t worry, that’s as good as it will get.
Anyway, enter Vista. I decided to give it a whirl in a fresh VMware session. All I can say is Oh. My. God. I gave the thing 2 virtual processors and 2.5GB of RAM and it was still awful. I personally think the way the new Windows Explorer (My Computer, etc) design is terrible and totally difficult to use. I know the argument is that “it is just different,” but I don’t think so. It made simple things that I do hundreds of times a day so much harder. It only took me a half hour of playing around before I killed the virtual machine and wiped it into oblivion. It was that bad.
I guess if you really don’t have anything important to do with a computer (like spider solitare) Vista is OK. But really, if you need to get stuff done, stick with XP.
I spent almost a full day cleaning / tweaking / hacking on Vista to get it usable. There’s a slew of things to modify / disable… but yeah, if you can stick with XP… do it.
I started, but it just wasn’t worth the effort.
Spider solitaire rules!