I guess that’s the difference… Windows is tolerated. OSX is enjoyable to use.
Anyone try out MS office '07 yet? I’m mainly concerned with retro-compatibility with Office '03.
I find the fact that MS word processing apps don’t play well together, to be mind-blowingly stupid.
Remember the one Word upgrade that wasn’t forward-compatible? Yep: the new version wouldn’t open the files of the old version.
Microsoft rushed out a patch for that one real quick.
The real problem with the differing MS file formats, such as Word documents, is that there is no easy way of telling which version an individual file is.
The same thing happened to this guy
That’s no good. Hopefully people realize this before their laptops get cooked.
I wanted to buy a computer with XP on it last week, but they were all gone, so I got one with Vista installed today.
So far I give Vista two thumbs down. I think the interface is too flashy for one. It thinks you’re stupid and keeps asking if you’re sure you want to do things, no really are you really really sure? (you can turn it off. eventually) I can’t even find a way to make it display the file menu in folders yet!
Has anyone gotten a wireless adapter/router set up to work on it yet? Nothing I’ve found on google points to anyone having success, just problems, which has been my experience. It wouldn’t play nice with the adapter I already owned, nor will it work with the one I bought that’s supposed to have a driver to make it compatable (not that this beta driver has any install instuctions whatsoever). Grrr.
Not having any access to the internet really diminishes some of the “ooh! shiny!” factor of owning a brand new computer.
You guys are smart, so riddle me this: do I need a wireless adapter that’s the same brand as the router? I’ve found another brand (Belkin) that gives you a list of cards that have “native” drivers in Vista, which I assume means that they’re part of Vista’s software since one of netgear’s claims that to be the case; I don’t want to install other drivers if I can help it, given it didn’t exactly work last time. If the adapter and router can be from different makers, I think that’d be better give A. I’m highly annoyed at netgear b. belkin has an adapter that’s $60 cheaper than the only one with native drivers on netgear’s site.
I’ve not tried Vista yet, but I did become a lot less interested in doing so after reading this article on the legal fineprint.
As a brief, but amusing aside, in a google search a few days back my brother and I discovered that more than 5% of the time “craptacular” is used on the interweb, it’s in conjunction with the word “vista”.
Disclaimer: This is coming from a Mac devotee, though I do own one PC, which is the heart of my recording studio. I have not tried Vista, or in fact seen Vista in use.
Carry on.
Um, this may be a stupid question, but what the hell is an “unused icon”?
No, as long as they both support some of the same wireless protocols, they should be interchangeable.
It’s an icon you haven’t clicked for a certain period of time. Windows XP (and I presume Vista also) runs something called the Desktop Cleanup Wizard that attempts to identify redundant shortcuts - perhaps those that you might have temporarily placed on your desktop, but have forgotten to remove afterwards.
I find it an annoying feature and it’s one of the first things I turn off when I set up a new machine.
I’m trying to figure out how an operating system could possibly be enjoyable to use. I mean do you really get that much joy out of opening your web browser a certain way?
It’s an old admin joke. They break stuff in the first SP, fix it in the second, break it again with the third, fix it again in the forth, etc, etc.
It’s not as valid these days because of Windows Update services, but in XP SP2 was much better than 1.
That’s a hard question for me to answer for someone who hasn’t used a really friggin’ good operating system and it’s associated batch of excellent software.
OSX has the iLife suite, which is enjoyable and fun to use. You can enter people into your address book and associate a picture of them from iPhoto and see that contact in iChat. Then you load up iSync and it syncs that person and all their information to your phone, along with your calendar events that you’ve entered in iCal. This is all done automatically, quickly, easily, seamlessly, intuitively.
But that’s iLife. When it comes to the OS, I’m not nagged constantly by 2,000 pop-up windows asking questions it should already know the answers to. My work is not interrupted by things the OS assumes are more important. Setting up a new program doesn’t (usually) require an “install” like it does in Windows world… a program works the same way a file does… you drop the program into your “Applications” folder, and there ya go. It works. To uninstall you don’t need to go through some bizarre “uninstall” wizard. You drag it to your trash can. Deleted. Done.
The interface is simple and elegant. An 80 year old with no interest in computers could sit down and make one work, but power users can change and modify things however they want. Likewise, OSX comes in 1 flavor… OSX. Windows comes in I think 8 different varieties this time around. And if you get the upgrade version, it requires XP to be installed ALREADY when you put it in your system! That’s absolute insanity. So if you want to reinstall your OS, you’ve got to install a full version of XP, then install Vista on top of it?! I can’t imagine a software engineer thinking that’s a good way to do things. It just doesn’t make sense.
There’s a lot of things in Windows-world that don’t make sense, but are tolerated as previous others have said… meh. I was ‘meh’ about the Windows machines I used too. But my Mac… I’m certainly not ‘meh’ about OSX (obviously).
I “love” the fact that if you log in as a new user, one of the first things it does is run the Desktop Cleanup wizard to tell you that there are icons you haven’t clicked on in a long long time…
Now that I’ve learned how to disable it, I shall be doing so.
Grim
I had a Linksys USB NIC (don’t ask) that would install itself every time it was plugged in…but wouldn’t uninstall itself after it was unplugged. I had a good dozen copies of that thing in my device manager before I figured out what was up…
-Joe
Also, lets remember that Microsoft has an annoying way or creating dialogue boxes as individual windows that show up on top. In OSX, they are attached to the window of the program that created them. So when you get those stupid “Your computer may have viruses” messages, they come scrolling out of the top of Firefox or Safari.
OSX is so much better in so many ways, that you really need to experience both to understand why. Even small things. Let’s take third party apps, for example. Apple’s taste in interface development has rubbed off on developers too. Look at Acquisition and compare it with Limewire. Same network, only that Acquisition manages to make things much more streamlined (dumps all downloaded tunes into an iTunes playlist called…wait for it…Acquisition. Sorry, had to throw in a G.O.B. reference. Windows applications usually depend on the user to know how to do those things, so they disregard it. What it does, in essence, is makes it easier for people who don’t understand the underpinnings of a computer, and it also makes it more convenient for those that do. iChat is great. I seriously HATE AOL’s AIM software. It does retarded things like changing my font for no reason. It’s annoying, and is too complicated and makes all kinds of annoying noises. Even the Microsoft MSN client for OSX is great. Desktop Cleanup wizard is a great example of a totally useless utility. Why do I need help cleaning up my Desktop? If I feel my desktop is too clutered, I’ll delete the files I put there. Why do I need help with this?
Secondly, there’s the Dock. It serves the purpose of the taskbar, and startmenu on OSX. All of your important programs are there. When they are running you see a small indicator below the icon to show you that. To switch to it you you click it.
And finally, startup and shutdown. This is great. A Mac shuts down it probably 4 seconds, and can start up in about 15. I’ve compared it with Windows XP on my mac (Mine is an intel) and Windows is easily twice as long, if not more. Sleeping is even better. Less than a second either way. On laptops it’s a thing of beauty. Done? Close the lid. Ready to work again? Open it up. You’ll find that you are already connected to the network before you can even get your hands on the keyboard. I imagine that the wakeup from sleep process places a high priority on network connection.
But back to Vista, they copy loads of stuff from OS X (Gadgets anyone?) but never seem to get that what makes it so great. It’s secure, and requires authentication for a few things, but not for every single dangerous thing you can possibly do. If you see 20 windows asking for authentication a day (a dialog box! no password. If a windows user is good at doing anything it’s making dialog boxes go away) then you aren’t going to cast a stray glance at the one that could matter. This is just the problem of the OS getting in your way all the time. People don’t want to know what the computer is doing. I don’t need a popup to tell me that I’ve installed new programs. I KNOW that. I did it! I don’t need to hear a stupid click everytime IE loads something.
Some things seem to be a step in the right direction though. I like the idea of Microsoft verifying drivers. I know it doesn’t work well now, but I bet it will. Prettying up the UI was good too. I do like the idea that Vista has changed the “My Documents” to a more reasonable “Documents” Going back from my old Dos days, I’ve always been against folders with spaces.
Anyways, It’s a shame, really that Microsoft didn’t make Vista better, purely from a “not annoying the user” side of things, which are pretty easy to do. As for OSX, it’s one of those things that you have to experience to know how great it is. It’s like the BMW of operating systems. Before I had ridden in a luxury car, I didn’t know what the hubub was all about. But after I had, I realized the quality of every small part added up to something greater than the sum of its parts. This is the way OSX is.
Dude, the operating system has, like, five billion features, and this one is only five clicks deep. How many features do you really want at your beck and call so that you can disable them accidentally with just two or three errant clicks? Just the annoying ones? Okay, that’s fair. Hey. You know those User Response survey links they have on the Microsoft website? Ever fill one out?
I absolute do not fill out Microsoft surveys. I’ve already found a good solution instead of waiting for Microsoft to fix Windows: OSX.
Anyway, OSX would never assume I’m a dumbass who would “accidentally” click 3 times to turn off a completely annoying and ridiculous feature, then pop-up a window asking me is I was sure I wanted to do that. It would just let me work.
Bad stuff, that. It turned me off to Vista.
Couple questions regarding Vista/PCs;
(regarding the link in the quoted post)
Why can’t the DVD player just work like a normal DVD player and pass the HD image to an HD monitor like every other HD DVD player? Why get Vista (the OS) involved at all? (I don’t have an OS on my stand alone DVD player…)
Can a person run OSX on a non-Apple machine? If not, why not?
Thankyou!
This is too weird. I did the exact same thing. After I took a crowbar to my old desktop to get the drive cage out (really really stupid case design - crowbars and don’t mix, kids), it stopped working. It was really old so it was time to get a new one. So I went out to get a new laptop over the weekend - and they wouldn’t sell me one! I had to wait till yesterday to get one. I even asked if they would sell me a blank computer without an OS on it and they said “No”. I feel like a big geek getting Vista the very first day it came out. 
Anyway, I cannot get onto the interweb either. Although I don’t think it is Vista’s fault. I can connect to the network and I can see the wireless router and its properties, but there is a big red “X” between the router and the internet on the network map. I am going to try going to a coffee shop tonight and see if I can connect to the interweb that way. Any other suggestions?
As far as Vista itself, I’m on the fence. I really liked the fact that you could just quickly search for files and media. I didn’t like the fact that it is so intrusive. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the pretty UI - as long as it is easy to look at all day. It was pretty easy to use though. I’ll have to wait and see about external devices - I am going to expect some trouble though. For instance, I’ll have to figure out how to get my 10 year old non-USB printer attached to it.
I’ll have to agree with this. There really are about 5 billion options in an OS. If there was just a button on the desktop that pulls up an alphabetical list of all the options you can choose, it would be miles long. It has to be grouped logically somehow. Now, the fact that it asks you if your sure you want to turn off the desktop clean up wizard is a different story. Formatting a disk or turning up the resolution beyond the capabilities of the monitor (from personal experience back in the day… don’t do that) is one thing, but just turning off a cleanup wizard is a different thing entirely.