WINDOWS VISTA REVIEW

Change of pace tonight, folks. Today I am doing a review of Windows Vista. Yeah, it's a little late, but oh well. I thought I'd enjoy my new laptop, but so far I have had more problems than anything.

The short: I hate it. They took all the things I knew about windows and threw them in the trash. You can't go to control panel and choose display. You have to hunt around for it. I would figure the controls would be in the damn control panel!

You can't add your own buttons to windows explorer. There is no "up" button. Some damn blue organize bar is there instead, and it's always blue, even if your color scheme is red or some other contrasting color. The tasks on it are useless for me, especially since I won't be burning CDs on this laptop. You have to enable the menu bar to be able to move things directly, otherwise you have to cut and paste. That’s a real hassle, especially since the address bar is not a real address bar!

There's this damn "nag" program that asks you to confirm everything you do. Good thing I can turn it off or there would be reformatting in order. Everything is "security" based. Well, if you know what you are doing, you don't need this crap.

Instead of backup discs, you get a recovery partition. Thanks for wasting 10 gigabytes. I could have used that for movies or pictures. It is also exceedingly lame that you have to make your own backup discs. They couldn't shell out a dollar for a couple blank discs and print them? :/

Some of those problems may belong to HP, but it's easier to blame Microsoft. So far it is a good laptop, with a better graphics card than my desktop. I hate using a touchpad, though, so I had to buy a mouse. The keyboard is flat, and that's a pain too. It has a nice big screen, though, so I guess that makes up for it. I'm curious, though. It's an AMD Turion X2, yet System Requirements Lab keeps saying it can't run anything. Oh well.