figety little widget
As much of a pain Windows Vista Ultimate edition (not nearly as cool as it sounds) has been, I've gotten used to it. It's still no XP, but, it's not half bad. When you've used Windows ME though, I guess nothing can be too awful. Please do not remind me of those terrible, terrible years.
I particularly enjoy two things: the sleep function, and the widgets. The sleep function is pretty useful....it combines the quick start-up speed (can you consider it starting up? resume speed would probably be a better term) of the old stand-by mode, with the data protection of hibernate. Instead of completely powering off, like in hibernate, sleep puts the laptop into a low power consumption mode, while writing an image of the desktop to both memory and the hard drive. The result? Start up that takes seconds (as opposed to minutes), and all your data still intact.
The other cool part about Vista (yeah, I said it), is the sidebar. I guess it's Windows attempt at being more Mac-like. Kinda like how Aero is supposed to compete with Linux's Beryl, but failed horribly. Anywho, you can fill your sidebar with all sorts of little widgets. For example, you can have mini games, your GMail inbox, facebook photo viewer, and a whole bunch of other useless things, right at your fingertips. I personally enjoy the post-it note (although it's not nearly as useful as it should be), the calendar, the weather report, and the NHL scoreboard.
I still, however, do not enjoy user activated controls (it still pops up every time you boot the computer, even if you disable it), or the fact that all the office 2007 programs like to crash whenever you try to close them. Actually, I hate the whole office 2007 suite in general. It's just trying to be too hip, which isn't all that great when I spend ten minutes looking for spell-check.
Overall, Vista isn't that bad. It just took....four months to get used to it.
On a slightly more important note, today's orange was much better than the one I had last week. It actually tasted like an orange. Go fruit!
-sm
I particularly enjoy two things: the sleep function, and the widgets. The sleep function is pretty useful....it combines the quick start-up speed (can you consider it starting up? resume speed would probably be a better term) of the old stand-by mode, with the data protection of hibernate. Instead of completely powering off, like in hibernate, sleep puts the laptop into a low power consumption mode, while writing an image of the desktop to both memory and the hard drive. The result? Start up that takes seconds (as opposed to minutes), and all your data still intact.
The other cool part about Vista (yeah, I said it), is the sidebar. I guess it's Windows attempt at being more Mac-like. Kinda like how Aero is supposed to compete with Linux's Beryl, but failed horribly. Anywho, you can fill your sidebar with all sorts of little widgets. For example, you can have mini games, your GMail inbox, facebook photo viewer, and a whole bunch of other useless things, right at your fingertips. I personally enjoy the post-it note (although it's not nearly as useful as it should be), the calendar, the weather report, and the NHL scoreboard.
I still, however, do not enjoy user activated controls (it still pops up every time you boot the computer, even if you disable it), or the fact that all the office 2007 programs like to crash whenever you try to close them. Actually, I hate the whole office 2007 suite in general. It's just trying to be too hip, which isn't all that great when I spend ten minutes looking for spell-check.
Overall, Vista isn't that bad. It just took....four months to get used to it.
On a slightly more important note, today's orange was much better than the one I had last week. It actually tasted like an orange. Go fruit!
-sm