So Mom couldn't wait for Vista and didn't have enough computer to bother to upgrade, so she bought a new laptop with Vista preinstalled.That actually, is a lie. The truth is, Mom's power supply is apparently about to die. It's gone wonky, the computer is about to turn five; it wasn't exactly top of the line when it was new. I'd say she's gotten her use out of that machine.
So, with my help, we scour the weekend sales flyers and find a mid-range Gateway with a Pentium, 1 Gig of Ram, 80GB HD, 15" widescreen, 802.11 B/G/N, Vista Home Premier for $600 after mail in rebate. I steered her away from the $400-500 laptops: Celeron processors, 512k ram, 802.11 B/G and most damning, Vista Home
Of course, I get to set the thing up. I take it to my house, cause of course there'll be updates. Not surprisingly, a smallish one for the Antivirus software (yay-McAfee not that awful Symantec junk) and only 18MB for Vista (five vista updates and one or two others.) The interface is a little different, which means you have to look around for stuff, but it's mostly all still there.
Verdict: So far, it seems like they polished the glass. I'm not sure I love Aero, it seems like the fluffiest sort of resource-hogging eye candy. Granted I have a Powerbook, so my opinon is a little biased. On the other hand, considering I use OS X, obviously I'm looking for a nice GUI. It seems to be XP reskinned, I guess I'll have to wait and see if it's more than meets the eye.
2 comments:
I enjoyed my preview of Vista during my visit last week. Home Premium doesn't appear to be as wimpy as I imagined but I'd like to still hold our for Ultimate. I'll have to agree with my brother when he said it appeared to be a lot of window (no pun intended) dressing on the same-ole-same-old operating system. Where to find things will be frustrating for a bit until you get used to it etc. etc. But, I also agree with another more tech-savy friend and coworker when he said that a lot of the benefit lies behind the scenes and may not be evident at first glance. I can't seem to get those PC/MAC ads out of my head though.
Those pc/mac ads are funny, I like the one where pc is getting the webcam taped to his head.
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