[Androme]

At first I hated it. Now I'm loving Vista. I still have Win XP as dualboot incase anything ever ****s up.

I don't need to have loads of bloody CD's to install all my drivers for all my hardware even for my graphics card, it seemlessly just searches the internet for my drivers and downloads them in under a minute or two (benefit of *be 24mb).

I have no performance issues with Vista, probably because of my setup. I've got 2GB of low-latency RAM which I've further set to aggressive timings and a nifty Raptor hard-drive which is fast as **** when loading games - I had a normal SATA-II drive before and I just replaced it with the raptor drive for the sake of it. I notice how programs load-up faster and game levels load-up faster.

Vista seems to load in the same time Win XP did if not a bit faster (with the same kind of startup programs).

Any programs I had issues with I've got around through the Compatability Mode option...I've only had to do this for two programs actually and that's uTorrent (don't know but it kept on freezing, put it on comp. mode and it works like a doodle) and also YzDock.

The sidebar is neat and I'm really loving it. I've lowered the opacities so they're not intrusive at all. I've got quick recycle bin, shutdown, hard-drive stats, run shortcut, nice IP tool which copies to clipboard by just clicking on it etc.

The thumbnails load up quiicckkk and I love the inbuilt support for really large thumbnails. The folders from medium size onwards will display but to 2 cropped images of images or videos from inside the folder which I like a lot. I don't have annoying thumbs.db files lying around anymore either (I had hidden files turned on).

If you people love Vista but don't have the hardware to run it, you can get a really good Vista theme now. An excellent Vista Windowsblinds theme exists which will make Windows look 'identical' to Vista (I know as I've got it on my Win XP OS). For those that don't want Windowblinds, there's a TrueTransparency program that gives the frame pure transparency like in Vista - but - it cannot blur the frame like Vista does - still, it makes up for what msstyles lack.

The tooltips feature can be downloaded, the neat way you can switch between programs and tasks can be downloaded... even the Sidebar exists (it's a patched sidebar straight from Vista itself so the gadgets intended for Vista are installable on it). Control panel modifications exist to make it look like Vista, Styler toolbars to accompany Windowblinds/msstyles themes.

Now onto the annoying things I have found so far:

The first annoying thing I found about Vista is the fact that Microsoft are ****wits for turning on UAC on by default. Everytime I customised this, installed a program, installed a driver kept asking me to give it permission. Took me quite a while to realise I could turn it off and then more annoying and wasted time trying to find the feature to turn it off only to have it tell me I have to restart. Grr.

The second is that the "up" function (to go to parent folder) in folders no longer works. Which is a real pain in the butt. The work around is to press Alt + UP. Um. NO NO NO NO NO NO. The reason why is because MS want you to use the address-bar to go to parent folder but this is long and unnecessary. No-one has figured out a way how to modify the lil arrow to go up a folder yet or modify the toolbar so a button for up can be done. I'm also suprised they never included a new folder shortcut!