Blog - /Tech

I am the designated configurator of new laptops received by family members before they pass on to more eager hands. A recent assignment of this sort on behalf of a sister led to trying out Windows Vista.

The interface is definitely more aesthetically pleasing than Windows XP. The Start menu button and the tool bar look particularly better. The "All Programs" submenu of the Start menu allows you to click on folders to see their contents in-line, which was interesting. The menu did not take up much of the screen, however, which might be annoying to those who have many programs installed.

I haven't seen any of the cool window-management features that were shown in various screenshots, since the normal usage routine does not seem to include them.

It was surprising to see that the shutdown and reboot buttons have been pushed off into a continuation menu. I accidentally clicked on the Suspend button by mistake, thinking that it was a shutdown button.

One thing that always strikes me when I use Windows are the default fonts. I think that they look much worse than the Bitstream Vera fonts in terms of font shape. They are also render very badly in some contexts, such as the login screen — I could easily pick out some blurry letters, and a trademark sign that was little more then a pencil mark.

I wasn't impressed too much with the sidebar. The drop-shadows were cool, but the content was lackluster. They had analog-only clocks, a decent though simple weather applet, and some sort of picture-changer. The picture-changer was kind of neat, so I kept it on as eye candy for the sister. It would have been cool if the applets reacted to moving the mouse over them, or clicking on them. For instance, I wanted more from the hover text of the weather applet than just "Cloudy".

I installed various bits and pieces like Miro, Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG Antivirus, and VLC. This particular sister indicated that she might not be completely opposed to having some GNU/Linux variant installed alongside Windows, so I tried out the Wubi installer for Ubuntu. The installation process went very smoothly. Upgrading from feisty to gutsy after the install was a bit of a chore, due to the gutsy package of hal not working — I had to replace it with the one from feisty, and force-purge the hal-info package. Easier might have been to just try out an alpha release of the Wubi installer for gutsy from here. I also changed the boot menu entry from "Wubi Ubuntu" to "Ubuntu Linux" using some terrible Windows Vista command line tool.