Windows Vista: Good or bad?

Hehe does the same for me too. (Winkey+Tab).
I like how in the games section it shows information about the game, and for recent games can EASILY tell you if you can run it or not.

 

While I find the 3D flippy thing neat, as is the preview when you hold your cursor over the taskbar, I didn't like that Aero eats up 50+ MB of RAM. Vista basic theme uses ~1MB over having the theme module shut down.

Also if you want Aero, you can speed it up by simply disabling transparencies. Personally I find the transparent effects useless.

One good thing about the 3D flip thing is it gets people using the winkey. It is one of the most underutilized button on the keyboard. Most people notice it brings up the start menu, figure it's pretty useless and leave it at that. In fact the following are a bunch of shortcuts that work on Vista and previous versions of windows:

Winkey+ R ->Run
Win+ E->Windows explorer
Win+ L -> Lock (password protect it, useful at work. Otherwise you have to do CTRL+ALT+DEL, then "lock workstation"

Win+ Pause -> Brings up "My computer properties" quick way to access device manager, etc

Win + F ->Find file
Win + M (or D)-> Minimize all
Win + TAB -> will switch applications by selecting on taskbar instead of traditional alt-tab menu

You can also get third party apps to add other shortcuts so you can quickly open apps. eg: win+1 opens firefox, win+2 opens word, etc.

Another underutilized button is scroll lock. Useful for using the keyboard arrows to scroll a spreadsheet without moving the selected active cell.

SysRq is just useless.

 

*shrugs* The truly tech savvy go on linux. That's probably where I'm gonna end up, for the sake of my degree.

 

I knew from the start XP was a winner. I was waiting for years for Whistler to finally be released. 9x/ME(Mistake Edition) had support for games but was terribly unstable, unsecured, unreliable, etc. EVERY little system change needed a restart to be effective. NT/2K was years ahead of 9x as far as stability, but lacked game support. By merging both streams into one, home users got to take advantage of the superior NT kernel.

9x would BSOD at a moment's notice (Stop everything! You removed a CD!). Fat32 file system was already obsolete when it came out. In fact 9x was obsolete before it was even released.

With 9x you're lucky to get a week of uptime before an arbitrary unrecoverable freeze (with an unpatched version of 95 the maximum uptime is ~56 days before it runs into an uptime bug. I've rarely had XP freeze, and normally get uptimes of a month before I restart for one reason or another.

XP even runs great on a derelict PII machine. It runs as fast or faster than 98 and much more stable.

I also consider myself "tech-savvy" yet have found few new features in Vista that are improvements over XP, and I still don't recommend people upgrade, simply because of the lack of any real improvements making it worth the money or hard drive space.

 

<3 I run a tri-boot of Vista Home Premium, PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu 7.

My main reasoning for vista is because the market is going to go there anyway. It's windows. There's nothing we can do. >_< Plus XP Professional was more expensive than Vista Home Premium oddly enough. :dry: