I kinda like Vista

 I got a new computer at work on Tuesday, as my personal laptop has been dying a slow and painful death recently.  I found myself recently doing a lot of wondering of “What is it DOING?”, while I watched processes hang and heard noises that probably shouldn’t come from a computer and I begun to think that eventually smoke would come out of it, as it rolled over belly-up with it’s tongue hanging out and I could kiss the last two digital years of my life goodbye.  The new computer came in last week and I propped Old Faithful in it’s position in my apartment where it will be used to check email and serve up old episodes of Sex and the City.

The title of this post started out as “I heart Vista” and since has been downgraded to “I kinda like Vista”, I’m sure if you have dealt with it at all, you might have an inkling as to why.   The new, pretty little IBM ThinkPad came with Vista installed  and the first thing I thought was “this is HOT!”  Basically, the look and feel is very Mac-y, I love the Windows sidebar, which I use in a lot of the same ways as Google Desktop (which I die for, but had to uninstall due to a huge drop in processing speed).  It’s pretty sexy, take a look:

My favourite, useless little feature is the ability to scroll through windows like that.  It doesn’t really help me at all, but it looks really hot.

Things went downhill when I stopped getting email.  Because of some weird issue with Outlook 2003 and Office 2007, emails were coming in and not getting to my inbox.  God knows where they went, I’m still looking.  Of course, then it takes hours to solve this problem, involving uninstalling etc.

I know the general response that most people have when they hear the word “Vista” is to shudder and maybe even throw up in their mouth a little, but honestly, it’s really not that bad.  I can’t think of another time where it hasn’t been at LEAST a 3 day effort to set up a new computer and get everything running properly, with a significant amount of time googling error messages.  The standard for operating systems from Microsoft is pretty low in my mind, so the experience wasn’t too out of line with my expectations.  The sexiness factor and at least a little bit of an effort to catch up to the Mac interface makes up for the crap.  In the special olympics of operating systems, this one wins gold.