DATE: <$BlogItemDate$> 2/13/2007 11:08:00 AM
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TITLE:Vista first impressions
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So my new laptop arrived yesterday. I've finally accepted that I don't play computer games or use any of the heavyweight nonsense that my monster PC offers. Out it goes and in comes a fresh space in the bedroom, in comes some serenity (No hair-dryer-like fan noise from the glowing black/blue monolith in the corner) and in comes a sleek, shiny, wireless laptop that can be hidden away in a drawer when not in use and does what I've always done on the PC - checks email, browses the internet and simply holds my photos and a few small files.
No sooner had it arrived, than I had to take it back to the shop. Pesky thing was reporting 766MB of RAM, when I'd plainly paid for a full 1GB. It was swapped over happily and the delivery charge was refunded (Thank you 24h Tesco) and the new, perceptively shinier one got booted up... also with 766MB of RAM. A quick look at the BIOS showed that 256MB was given over to the graphics card. Ahem. Anyway.. free delivery :)
Being a new laptop, it came primed with Vista Home Premium, and I have to say there are some things I do like, and some things I don't. First thing I don't like is the 40 minutes it took to set itself up for the first boot, particularly as I had to do this twice on two different laptops. Surely some setting up in the factory wouldn't be too hard? First impressions and all that...
To be fair, most of it was Acer's fault who deemed it necessary to interrupt the Vista sheen with
Windows 2000-style command prompts popping up installing all sorts of uninvited 'handy tools'. There was a further 20 minutes of de-configuration to remove all the parasitic utilities and toolbars that marred those precious first impressions. If I had a hundred pounds for every time I've removed a Norton Internet Security 'trial' (geddit?) from a struggling, choked PC then it still wouldn't be worth it.
After all that, it was time for some proper first impressions. I have to be honest, it was a weird mix of 'oooh!' and 'meh'. The imagined dreadful intrusion of the sidebar turns out to be a bit of a welcome friend on a laptop with a wide screen that would otherwise be far too wide for a browser window. It actually consumes some excess screen real-estate. Flip3D is as gimmicky as you'd think it is. It's nice the first time you see it, but Alt-TAB is still quicker.
The composite UI effects are quite nice though, and are thankfully on the right side of 'snappy' without being intrusive. Windows emerge and retract rather than pop up and down and the effect is a surprisingly fluid and interactive experience. The glass aero effect is nice, and it gives windows a surprising tangibility.
With the rest of the world moving over to Firefox and me left far behind (With my beloved Maxthon) I had thought that the new laptop event might be the time to move over to Firefox (While I'm getting used to a different interface anyway). Problem is, the pre-installed IE7 is, well... nice. It's clean (After removing the parasitic toolbars) and seems to have just enough features on display. I might stick with it for a while to give it a fair trial. Sorry, Firefox.
If there's one thing that does my head in with Vista though, it's the 'High-DPI awareness' thing. Basically, Vista-aware apps look good, but older ones are scaled up too look bigger on a finer-pixel screen. This scaling is done as a bitmap surface in the graphics card, and that means that older apps actually look slightly blurry. It makes my eyes go funny. And yes, text is horrible to read, particularly as the ClearType anti-aliasing is scaled up too, making the letters have weird eye-ball wrecking colour fringes around them.
I'm trusting that there's an off-switch for that feature somewhere. Haven't looked yet.
Hopefully my nice, cheap bargain eBay 4GB pen drive should arrive today and I can start the happy process of shifting over the contents of an old 180GB hard drive and ruining that pristine, snappy new Vista.
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