Geek Huddle

Last weekend, I got my reenlistment bonus for signing up for another 4 years in the military, and have been meaning to buy a new computer, so, I did, and i’m incredibly happy with it. I’ve been stuck with a laptop that I got back in ‘03, and it’s been o.k. for the first few years, but lately just crapping all over me. I bought a nice 22″ monitor, got like 320 GB’s of hd space, 2 gb of ram, just a nice upgrade for me.

Anyways, onto vista, it came pre-installed as most computers probably do nowadays, and I must say, I’m quite fond of it. It’s nice to be able to explore everything again, and i’m still trying to find everything in there, some might say that’s a bad thing, but it’s like any switch really. The aero feature is quite eye-pleasing, and the GUI has been updated tremendously. I just looks alot cleaner then XP’s default. The new disk space monitors are a nice addition, as well as the flip 3D program they put in, WinKey + Tab sorts out the windows in 3D and are able to switch between them like that, you still have the Alt + Tab which has been updated as well.

There’s a new feature I’m liking too, which is the ability to change the volume on individual programs, it’s in the volume mixer you normally would see in your systray, but in the mixer options.

Alot of people give Vista flac for the constant nagging, i.e. Are you sure you want to do this, and that? Well, it’s quite simple to turn off in control panel, under user accounts. So now, no more nagging at all.

You can also now change the size dramatically of thumbnails by using a slider and just dragging it up or down to change the sizes of them, I enjoy that alot actually. Although I haven’t been able to download a ton of software, I haven’t found any programs that haven’t worked with it as people have mentioned elsewhere. The start menu is excellent now, integrated search menu allows you to type in whatever, band name, image, program, any file really, and you can just launch it from there. The task manager has been updated tremendously aswell, you can now add colums, and be able to go straight to the app to monitor the resources, it also does a better job of monitoring memory, network stats, and hard drive usage now too.

All in all, I’m really pleased with the upgrade, and hopefully more people will make the jump to start the skinning adventure there. Seems like there will be alot more possibilities with the added features of Vista.