Microsoft cannot be 100% happy with Vista if they a planning a new OS in only 3 years. I may give Vista a miss, just like I did with 2000 and ME.
Microsoft's game plan with OS' changes almost daily. They propose to have new client and server systems released every three years. When XP was in the workshop they didn't plan a major release for five - six years; XP was codnamed 'Whistler' and it's replacement codenamed 'Blackcomb', there would have been an interim release codenamed 'Longhorn'. Longhorn became Vista which after 5 years in the making has to be considered a major release all though all the new and exiting features were scrapped so they could get it packaged.
Blackcomb / Vienna / Windows 7 could be delayed until 2020 for all I care and I wouldn't run Vista it offers nothing over XP media center edition except a clumsy interface
"To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained. " The Doctor
Well... I stumbled onto the site again and I also ended up buying a computer with Vista preinstalled. It's a laptop so I couldn't really avoid the software bundle and get a rebate. I shrunk the partition down but holy crap it really is a lot on the drive for a clean install. It doesn't really have any extra's except for Norton and the laptop utilities but there's no way they can take up all that room. I actually did like the interface. It looked pretty neat and it wasn't better than the beryl or compiz projects on Linux but... well some animations were and there's one effect I like better but it's more limited in reality. I guess it's always fun to play with a new computer and I was using XP earlier today now that I think of it and it was kind of neat just to have a change.
Large installs don't really make a big differance today considering how much hard drives hold now, but thinking that Vista was sort of neat didn't last very long. Most of it was just as I said, a new interface and a refreshing change for a short period. First, I'll complain that I did on first boot have a window freeze and that furthermore the window was the Norton nag screen. Nag screens piss me off and those bubbles that pop up in Windows saying "Your computer is now connected to the cable that you just connected it to" and "You have turned off your firewall", those things are really annoying. Vista appears to have more of them than XP. Lots more I think. More on the intitial things I didn't like... mmm no I can't think of anything. Oh yeah I know, I was wanting to install the grub bootloader to a partition instead of the MBR, then copy those bits into a file and have the Vista bootloader pass me over to the Linux one so restoring things for resale later on would be that much easier. I wasn't able to do it right off and went looking on the internet. I came accross alot about how Vista has one of the most powerfull bootloaders there is and so on and so forth. So to set up this powerful bootloader how I wanted, instead of just editing the boot.ini file before, I had to download a program by another company, run it and have it do what these articles were raving about... copying the boot info from a grub install to a partition table that was not the MBR. The syntax of the bootloader's file was really confusing so... meh. Anyhow the stupid thing didn't even work but when I copied the info myself using Linux then overwrote the file that the other utility had created and crossed my fingers, it worked... so what do you know, it's powerful because someone pulled some crazy trick that's been around as long as XP and in my case using a tool that's been around as long as... well I watched to geeks argue about the best way to clone a drive and one of them was claiming to be using the utility for 25 years.
What the hell was I talking about again? Oh yeah. The Vista menu is a pain in the a** but then once you get used to it, it actually seems more organised that the XP menu. It's prettier too. And the panel is prettier, and the button is prettier, and IE7 is pretty neat looking. Everything is great until you have a program run that for whatever reason makes the OS say "A program requires the Vista be run in 'basic' setting" and then everything is all of a sudden just really ordinary looking and I thought to myself "Holy Crap! This is what it would look like if I didn't have a GPU in the computer? This really sucks! What a peice of crap OS! What a rip off, I'm glad this junk was bought in bulk by the computer manufacturer because I'd be pissed off if I payed full price for this." And I sort of realised that Vista doesn't really have all that much extra and that where it does have extra things, the really good things I've heard about it, they all of a sudden fall through and I'm thinking that if Microsoft couldn't have made a service pack that implemented better security, options for nifty well thought out filesystem encryption scenarios, and then also given people the option to turn on some nice eye candy then they really... oh hell I thought Microsoft had more than a handfull of smart people working there for a second, but with graphics that are uglier than XP and other implementations that can be easily added or integrated or upgraded into on other operating systems... I'll just say that I thought Vista was kind of neat and then all of sudden I found myself saying "Holy s**t, it's all smoke and mirrors!" and felt dissapointed... and that from a guy who doesn't really use the OS except for.. well that's another long story and my time here is limited to one post every 3 months. 2 posts this time though because I have to go find a thread Dara posted in and call her a hottie.
Yeah, so Vista actually was sort of dissapointing. It was pretty neat... I even for a second put meandering thoughts into learning some basic Windows coding stuff which of course means using and familiarising myself with the OS again, but it lasted as long as the eye candy and then it was gone in a puff of smoke.
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