Vista Review for You

Vista is almost here and the Internet is abuzz with excitement, or so Microsoft hopes. You can find thousands of reviews that meticulously pick apart vista as an operating system; its every feature and smallest flaw. I am here to give, my most likely non-existent audience, a general feel of the new OS. Please read it, humor me!

Vista new graphical interface is very polished, subtle, and pretty. It is a definite improvement over XP and in my opinion as good as OS X’s eye candy. Read on to discover more in depth analysis or skip to “Otherwise”.

The first thing you’ll notice about Vista is that it has a dramatically different appearance. Gone is the play-do like borders of XP and in its place is one of the most highly touted features in vista: the Aero Glass graphical interface. I am sure you have seen screenshots; the border is a slightly opaque smoked glass. The Task bar also has been redone to incorporate the new glassy feel. The whole look is very neat, polished, and pretty. Combined with the HDR backgrounds included it creates quite an effect. There is also now window shadows, and graphical effects when opening, closing, minimizing etc. The animations involved when closing a window are slightly disorienting at first (the window shrinks and “falls back” @_@) it is cool though still subtle.

Otherwise it is much the same as XP. All of its “special features” (aka windows sidebar, and live search [I think that’s what it’s called]) are currently available for XP at similar performance from third parties. The new icons/menus are nice but, again, not really needed. Drivers were hard to find and don’t work ALL the time. With the all the new features running in the background there is minor slowdown on some applications (Photoshop). Windows also has become especially needy in vista and asks your permission when basically anything happens to your system. You can shut it off but it’s still annoying……..I like the new windows noises too, much less jarring and obnoxious.

Conclusion: Vista isn’t that great. It is better than XP but not by that much. Graphically it is a dramatic improvement, but if eye candy was an issue you probably have OS X, and vista is not an OS X killer by any means. What does this mean? Nothing. Everyone still is going to have to get it at some point and criticism isn’t going to have much effect on a corporation that owns 95% of the OS market. My advice:

1. 1. Try Ubuntu, most likely you will get frustrated and won’t be able to stand it but you should give it a chance.

2. 2. Pray apple makes OS X x86, but we all know that’s not going to happen

3. 3. Download the uxtheme patcher (Google it), lets you use third party themes so you can get the best part of vista for free (download themes at deviantart.com)

4. 4. Use XP as long as you can, right now vista is overpriced and glitchy, wait awhile before upgrading

Thanks for reading!

-Quagga

P.S. The title rhymed did you notice?