Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Wrestling with Vista

Though I was extremely reluctant to have Windows Vista on my new laptop, it’s kind of hard to avoid. All the new laptops come with it. If I wanted a different OS, I’d have to install it myself. I was a bit too hasty about it.

The first thing anyone notices after using Vista for a little while is it prompts you for permission to do every. little. thing. Are you sure you want to visit that site? Are you sure you want to rename that? Are you suuuuure you want to use Vista?? Seriously, what a pain in the ass. Everyone hates it. Luckily it’s easy to turn off. You go into the Users item in the Control Panel and uncheck the checkbox for User Access Control. I had to research online to find it. I also had to research online about how to turn off all the other annoying features, because Vista doesn’t exactly make it intuitive to figure out.

Perhaps it would be somewhat intuitive if I’d had no experience with Windows at all. But coming from a Windows XP and Windows 2000 background, I expect things to be in certain places. So when they aren’t, it’s frustrating. They completely scrambled things around. I’m getting used to it now, but it took awhile. At one point I said screw this, reformatted the whole thing, and installed XP on it. It was easy. Unfortunately I completely forgot about drivers. It booted up quickly like a dream, and then I found the screen resolution was crappy, it didn’t recognize the wireless hardware, or any of the other special features the laptop came with. Crap. Stupid me. Luckily the laptop came with a recovery DVD and I was back to factory settings in 15 minutes.

The moral of the story here… If you’re going to flatten Vista in favor of XP, make sure you have two important things:  1) All the drivers necessary to make your machine fully functional in XP, and 2) a way to revert back to Vista in case you completely botch the XP job. I decided it was way too much work to make this thing fully functional in XP, so I’m going to stick it out with Vista for now. It actually isn’t so bad now.

Afterthought: One thing I really like about Vista is I can now plug and unplug USB devices without having to “stop” the service first. Plug, unplug, and all it does it beep to let you know about it. No more annoying popups telling you that you “unsafely” removed a device - sometimes it has consequences and sometimes it doesn’t. It was so annoying and weird. So glad they fixed that. Finally.