Bored Computer Boy

I've been looking for unhealthy things to do to my PC while I pass the time waiting for the "package" to arrive. Over the course of the week I've managed to accomplish (I use that term very loosely here) the following

• Download and install the latest build of Windows Vista (3058)


• Remove Windows Vista


• Download Ubuntu Linux


• Format a partition with 60 gigs worth of torrent downloads, movies, pictures and heck knows what while attempting to install Ubuntu Linux


• Bugger up said install of Ubuntu beyond bootability


• Install Windows Vista again

Ahhh you can taste the productivity...

User Stupidity aside however, I'm really liking bits of what I see from Microsoft's latest OS. Of course the first thing is that it looks MUCH prettier compared to XP (not especially difficult). The new windowing system finally takes advantage of 3D accelleration so we have a bucket of eye candy that OSX users have enjoyed for years now (transparencies, drop shadows, morphing, etc).



The guts of the OS are impressive too. Security wise pretty much any action that requires administrator privelages now pops up a confirmation box for you to click. Explorer has new filtering, sorting and stacking functionality for files. The Windows Sidebar could potentially rival OSX dashboard with useful gadgets. Performance analyser to let you know how crap your machine is and that it's time for an upgrade. Overall things feel rather solid for a beta.

The in built applications that come with the beta are impressive too. For the first time in years I find myself using Internet Explorer again. At least now they have tabs, popup blockers, expose like previews, RSS readers and a nice simple interface. I've also been clocking quite a bit of time with the in built games, particularly Microsoft's new generic pretty chess game Chess Titans. All the old faithfuls we're used to (Hearts, Solitaire, Mindsweeper) have all been given a facelift which is a bonus.

Some things that irritate me however are the way the system indexes your files for the new ubiquitous search engine. When this thing is running my system absolutely CRAWLS. I've taken to approaching the problem bit by bit and index a few folders at night when I'm not using the machine for fear that I'll commit unrecoverable acts of violence from the lack of response. Indexing also doesn't work on FAT32 partitions so I had to shuffle my files around while I formatted all my drives to NTFS. The other small annoyance I've found is that Java based apps which use Swing/AWT such as Azureus seem to throw off the new windowing system so in order to run these apps your windows have to go ugly again.

Hopefully these'll get ironed out before release. At this rate I'm definitely going to be upgrading to the retail version when it comes out. Thumbs up to Microsoft.