Yeah, and if you decide you hate it, you can always buy a copy of XP and put it on the machine. You might want to listen to Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott, which covers Vista tips, as well as MS news.
Vista sucks!
The search function is totally useless (runs very quick and finds nothing–files I am looking at are not found). The Aero (which can be turned off) is very confusing since the windows are partly transparent and it is not obvious what is in which window.
But the main problem is that you basically cannot do anything without getting asked permission. This can be turned off to some extent, but many of my standard programs cannot be installed or else cannot run properly because of permission issues. I have struggled to get my latest computer running but I am now trying to “downgrade” it to XP. If I were to do it over again, I would look to buy a used recent model XP machine since you apparently cannot find it on new machines. Someone told me that Dell still had that as an option, but only for the few days left in this year.
I thought of doing this, but someone told me the removal of Vista and installation of XP is VERY expensive. I’ll have to give Vista a fair chance before I go through more expense. I know, you think I can do this myself, but I was told there are so many hidden files to remove that it is best to have a pro do it.
Bullpucky. There’s an easy, and inexpensive way to remove Vista from your machine. Actually, there’s several, now that I think about it, but I only know how to do one of them. Install Linux on your machine, and then install XP. Linux (and distros like Ubuntu are easier to install than Windows) will completely wipe the harddrive, with a minimal amount of questions about “Are you sure you want to do this?” then when you install XP, it’ll wipe out Linux without bothering you about all kinds of scary warnings about rolling back your version of Windows and problems which might arise from doing this.
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Looks like you may need a Glazer in the near future
Don’t bother paying for this. Download the PC-DeCrapifier from http://pcdecrapifier.com/
Download this program, run it, and it will give you a whole list of the ‘crap’ programs on your machine, along with explanations of them. Then you can decide which ones you want to delete, and just click to delete them.
(Actually, if it’s someone from Best Buy’s Geek Squad that you are paying for this, they are probably doing exactly this procedure, using either this actual De-Crapifier program, or a special Geek Squad version of it.)
And I would agree with the others who said to dump Vista and install XP. The speedup is like a free upgrade to your machine!
May there be much happy and productive use use of your new gear, Kalhoun.
That’s because plain “search” is set to just look at a set of preindexed files and folders chosen by Vista itself. You have to THEN chose advanced options to look at the whole disk.
Yeah, I know, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” :rolleyes: A lot of Vista’s annoyances are quite obviously put there to protect the clueless from themselves, because let’s face it, you don’t make hundreds of billions of $ by only catering to the sophisticated user ;).
ISTM we’re looking at a new front in the OS wars, it’s no longer the Mac/Win/Linux slugfest but now we’re gonna get also XP v. Vista. Y’know what? From my use of it, Vista is not THAT horrible, it’s just that the long delay in putting it on the street had allowed many of us to (a) finally get the hang of XP, specially with SP2; (b) build up expectations; and © forget M$'s track record of not meeting expectations, of interspeding reasonably good OS upgrades with quite lame ones, and of bloat and resource-hogging. Hey, the latter has been a characteristic of ALL their product lines for years.
Is this necessary or advisable if I already have 2 Megs of RAM?
If you have two megs of RAM you won’t be able to run Windows 3.1, never mind Vista 
. If you have 2 gig of RAM then the USB ReadyBoost or whatever it’s called probably won’t really do that much unless you are using an application that specifically benefits from it (ISTR that it mainly helps with lots of random accesses to small files). If you have a memory stick lying around then give it a try and see what happens.