Vista
pcolijn: Forget asking if anyone tried to use Vista on a couch with a remote. I'm wondering if anyone tried to use it at all. My new laptop came with Vista, and for a couple of reasons I left it on for a few weeks. One of the main reasons was sheer curiosity - everyone was saying it was terrible, but I couldn't believe it was all that bad. To cut to the chase, it most certainly is; I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that it was a giant step backwards from Windows XP. I don't know who in their right minds would pay to upgrade, I'd go out of my way to get XP in preference.
First of all, I have to mention the most appalling aspect, which was the speed. It was positively glacial. It could take a couple of minutes to resume from sleep, and sometimes it would just get unresponsive for a little while. It was never snappy. Now granted, a large part of this is because my laptop's hard drive is rather slow, but it had a gigabyte of ram, there's no real excuse for the amount of swapping it was doing. If I'd stuck with Vista, I'd have been basically forced to get another gig or two of RAM, whereas Ubuntu runs like a total champ with what I've already got.
Redundant DialogsThen there's just so much WTF-ery on the go with the UI that it truly boggles the mind. Here you can see the two different dialogs for changing the theme. If you use the most obvious approach to turning the fancy Aero Glass theme on and off, you get one of them when Aero is active, and the other when Aero is disabled. I can't even begin to imagine why they have the two different ones, and furthermore why they're so similar but gratuitously different in design. Then there's the whole issue of how the Control Panel changes itself around when Aero is enabled, giving you different UIs in different situations. I'm sure that's going to be a real barrel of laughs for the people trying to write step-by-step instructions.
The Thin Teal LineThen there's Aero Glass itself. It's pretty enough, I guess, if you don't mind the thumbnails for the taskbar entries being occasionally kind of garbled. Oh, and as long as you don't try to change the colour away from black or blue. If you do, you'll then notice the unchangeable teal line that borders all the Aero Glass windows. You can't really see it in the thumbnail here, but it's pretty obvious in the larger versions, and even more distracting in real life.
Other bonus craziness in this screenshot:
First of all, I have to mention the most appalling aspect, which was the speed. It was positively glacial. It could take a couple of minutes to resume from sleep, and sometimes it would just get unresponsive for a little while. It was never snappy. Now granted, a large part of this is because my laptop's hard drive is rather slow, but it had a gigabyte of ram, there's no real excuse for the amount of swapping it was doing. If I'd stuck with Vista, I'd have been basically forced to get another gig or two of RAM, whereas Ubuntu runs like a total champ with what I've already got.
Redundant DialogsThen there's just so much WTF-ery on the go with the UI that it truly boggles the mind. Here you can see the two different dialogs for changing the theme. If you use the most obvious approach to turning the fancy Aero Glass theme on and off, you get one of them when Aero is active, and the other when Aero is disabled. I can't even begin to imagine why they have the two different ones, and furthermore why they're so similar but gratuitously different in design. Then there's the whole issue of how the Control Panel changes itself around when Aero is enabled, giving you different UIs in different situations. I'm sure that's going to be a real barrel of laughs for the people trying to write step-by-step instructions.
The Thin Teal LineThen there's Aero Glass itself. It's pretty enough, I guess, if you don't mind the thumbnails for the taskbar entries being occasionally kind of garbled. Oh, and as long as you don't try to change the colour away from black or blue. If you do, you'll then notice the unchangeable teal line that borders all the Aero Glass windows. You can't really see it in the thumbnail here, but it's pretty obvious in the larger versions, and even more distracting in real life.
Other bonus craziness in this screenshot:
- This is one of the Control Panel dialogs that disappears in the Classic theme.
- I had set the desktop background to fit the whole screen, but occasionally when waking up from sleep it would resize itself as you see here.
- The battery charge display in the task bar looks pretty sickly: this is because it's mostly transparent, along with the task bar itself. If you put a white window behind it, it becomes unreadable. To be fair, this isn't Microsoft's software, it's part of Lenovo's crappy bundled Windows drivers and software.