I hear where you're coming from, there, but I have to be honest when i say I really don't remember having to tool around as much with XP when it came out as vista just to get it to operate on a level I'd consider optimal. I bought my first xp box when I was living in BC (coincidentally where XP was partially developedWanderer wrote:Don't get me wrong, Tyler. I'm no MS fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. I was just making the observation that the Vista rollout really is not much different in terms of creativity, completeness, bugs, and system requirements being at the high end of the spectrum than any previous version.
Whenever MS puts out a new Windows version, it's the same complaints, every time. By now, it shouldn't be a surprise.
). It was such an improvement over 9.x that I was certainly willing to overlook a few little bugs, but I don't think I'm looking at it with rose colored glasses either, if you know what I mean. When I bought my xp machine, it worked just fine right out of the box (IIRC, it was an HP, 1.3ghz pentium4, had a 30gig HD and I opted for an upgrade to 500mb of ram. Cripes, but I think XP only occupied 2gig of the HD IIRC...). Vista was just plain buggy right out of the box, and took a bit of tooling around just to get it to run smoothly on a brand new computer. (up to this point we've just been talking about new computers; we haven't even gotten into the horror that is the Vista upgrade. With my old pent3 Dell, I was able to upgrade to XP no problem, still runs great...I tried upgrading a friends computer that's only 2 years old to Vista...ummnotsomuch.... )What really gripes me is that M$ claims that Vista will run just fine on a unit having only an 800mhz processor and 500mb of ram. that's tootin' baloney right there. At one point in time I shared a story about computer shopping with my little sis who's a decade my junior and just getting into college this year. She took me along because she knows next to nothing about the newer stuff on the market.
The sales guy we went to tried to pawn off a "minimun requirement" level computer on us, saying it would run vista no problem. He tried to convince of that fact by showing us a demo model of what we were supposedly looking at. I specifically asked the salesperson if it had identical specs to the one we were looking at, and he reassured me it did (there was even one of those stickers they put on the front of the towers to reassure you of it's capabilities
). Sure enough, it ran fine....Now, I'd been using vista for some time on my computer, and I know full well that a minimum system requirement unit isn't going to run vista worth a dang, so I pop on over to the properties menu on MyComputer, and sure enough, that damn showroom model had been upgraded. I could speculate as to what their game is, but that's another thread...
It just gripes me crazy that M$ will claim up and down that consumers are supposedly able to run vista on so little, but that the OS itself isn't even 100% maximizable at the "Vista Premium Ready" level. My computer exceedes their reccomended specs by double and still doesn't run at its full potential with all the options turned on. Even running with an extra 4gig via readyboost its still not quite to where M$ claims it should be.
If they want a pretty OS, great, I'm not opposed to that (in fact I love eye candy, but not when it interferes with the functionality of the system...by the way, Dear Microsoft, Aero is for Saabs, not for Microsoft...NOT YOURS! )[/i]
If you think the effects are even kind of cool take a look at Compiz: