I was initially intriqued by Vista which came with a new Toshiba laptop purchase last year. Consistent with the overall public opinion though, Vista essentially appealed to me as an attempt by MS to dismantle some of it's best Windows features into smaller pieces and then present them as somehow new and better. I never did fully embrace the mess that replaced Display.cpl which, though not perfect, had most everything display oriented in one place. I got the impression after discovering that Active Desktop was gone that, once again, MS's definition of improved is basically an operating system with bigger icons than the last one, plus SLOW. So, big icons and slower have been the standard since 95 (still their best system). So MS sent me a security patch thru WU that I thought I had turned off and after the ensuing registry corruption, and being caught away from home base without my usual STUFF, my only alternative was to put on a Windows 7 RC I had on disk. It wouldn't do a upgrade without the desktop and the partitioner in the RC didn't work so I had to do a custom install over the existing and rely on Windows to store my old data in a Windows.old folder.
That was hideous mistake finale'. Ooops. Where's the Windows.old folder with all my stuff. I knew I should have learned how to restore a backup registry.
Anyway, I only lost about years worth of stuff but I had an opportunity to check out Windows 7. True to reports, it did run faster and smoother than Vista all the way up to the point at which the RC evaluation period expired. At that point, as I understood it, the RC was supposed to restart the machine every 2 hours as a reminder to go out and spend real money for a retail copy.
Maybe MS thinks a blue screen is the same thing a restart, I don't know, but that's what I kept getting so I was, in fact, seriously motivated to run out and buy something. It just wasn't Windows 7. So I went out and bought XP Pro again. See it again for the first time. It screams. I could have run it on a virtualized Windows 7 but since 7 was just a reworked Vista, and Vista had a registry that was around 8 times the size of XP's, I just couldn't help but think that running a different OS virtualized on top of a reworked version of a bloated dying cow might prove trickier than just running XP outright. I'm back to happy and will remain so until MS figures out a way to send me another security patch with built-in OS vaporizers. BTW, I've since noticed that turning off Windows Update doesn't turn off Windows Update in XP. While it does stop the installation process, the machine still goes online for the updates even with the feature disabled. I found that kind of unsettling. Check the windowsupdate.log for proof. Why would it need to go online if it's supposed to be disabled. Maybe it likes to keep the OS vaporizers local just in case you accidentally enable Windows Update when MS is short on cash.
Anyway, I'll use XP until it becomes obsolete by not being able to run new and improved MS applications. At that point, I'll probably buy an Apple.
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