I think the perfect OS would be a mixture, really, of Windows, MacOS, Linux, … well all of them, I suppose. I mean, they all have good aspects, but none of them are perfect. I would make one that’s perfect for noobs and power users alike.

Vista is very nice; I like it a lot more than I originally thought I would, but of course you know how many other people are now saying that same thing. For one, I have noticed its stability over XP. XP installations seem to be hit-or-miss: some people never have any trouble, and others have all the trouble. For instance, I recently installed a copy of XP Pro on my machine. It started out rock-solid, with a much, much better MTBRDTOSC (mean time before restart due to OS corruption – hehe) than my previous installation of XP Home. And after I got most of my programs installed, it still seemed ok. But here recently I’ve had more trouble than I should expect (which would be none). I’ve had programs start acting up (Adobe Audition, Firefox, Skype) or even crashing (Firefox, Google Chrome, Winamp) after less than 100 hours of uptime. And one or two times, a restart didn’t fix it – but most of the time it does, which confirms to me where the issue lies.

So, Vista is stable. And it looks nice. However, the Basic theme (which I use, to avoid the unnecessary RAM carnage that comes with using Aero) needs a bit of help; I’ve seen mock Vista themes for XP that put it to shame. Additionally, getting rid of the cascading menus under “All Programs” was a good step, but just cramming it all into one small box, to me, is actually worse: at least with the menus, I could see all the folders at once (at any given depth). The search box in the start menu is a great idea. I wish the people that complain about the “Run” option being missing would at least bother to look at the start menu’s options. Anyone who even used “Run” should be able to figure out how to enable it in Vista – which, by the way, is possible but not necessary since the search box is basically “Run” on steroids.

Next gripe: the disparity of the look-and-feel of core dialog boxes. They should have paid enough attention to detail to go through everything and make sure it doesn’t reek of pre-XP flat colors and square corners and bad layout. (Of course, they should have done this in XP too, so it may have been unreasonable for me to expect that they would behave any different this time around. Maybe Windows 7?)

Lastly (only because I can’t think of anything else at the moment), I think renaming the desktop right-click option “Properties” to “Personalize” just oozes with feel-good self-centered individuality and the like. Granted, the name “Properties” needed to change. And maybe they wanted to keep it starting with “P” so people wouldn’t get lost like they undoubtedly would if that first letterhad been changed. I just think that I would have preferred “Customize”.

I’ll add more about Vista if anything comes to mind. But I can’t leave without saying something about the smug and pompous Apple and their OS. One thing that I like about Windows is that I get to choose how I go about doing what I need to do – and that’s what I don’t like about MacOS: you do things the one way that is allowed, or else you don’t do it at all. Case in point: window resizing. Not that I use this very often, but Windows gives you 4 borders to drag around to your liking; MacOS forces you to use only one corner, and if you can’t drag it far enough, then you’ll have to grab the title bar, pull it back far enough to give you the room you need, and THEN go all the way back down to the corner from whence you came, to FINALLY get the window to be the size you want.

Task switching in MacOS is … well, a lot different, for starters. First, in Mac land, people aren’t used to using maximized windows… thus, you could often switch tasks just by clicking in another window that peeps out from behind the one you’re in. If that’s not an option, then you have no way of knowing, at a single glance, what all programs you have open. You have to open a menu to see them (and then pick one to switch to). Ugh.

Would someone please explain to me Apple’s choice to make the OS’s menu bar also represent the menu bar for all other applications, instead of letting each program have its own?

For an OS that’s supposed to be sooo easy to use, why is it so easy for people to inadvertently leave programs running after closing the last window the program opened? Any normal program (like the ones that would do this in MacOS) in Windows would show itself on the taskbar if it was running – and if it’s not there, then under normal circumstances that also means it’s not running. In MacOS, there is no visual indication of this that can be had by simply looking at the screen.

<More to come, probably>

If you’re interested, you can read the SP3 release notes to find out everything that’s new – or, you could also skip straight to the list of fixes in SP3 (beware, it’s a long list!).

Enjoy – and happy XP computing to all!

… one who would pretty much ask me the same general questions. But HE would give me the installation ID I needed. How thoughtful!

So thankfully, I am now validated. And hopefully I won’t have to bother with that again for a long time to come.

So ya, I just bought a new processor (which required that I also purchase a new motherboard and thus a new graphics card). And so, my installation of XP balked when it saw all this new stuff. (I think the main problems were that [1] it couldn’t run the new ACPI, and [2] it didn’t know what to do with a 64-bit processor, since I upgraded from an AMD Athlon XP to an Athlon 64.)

Thus, I had to wipe my Windows partition and reinstall. (Yes, I tried the repair options, and they didn’t really work.) So I suppose it goes without saying that I’d now have to activate this fresh install of XP.

Since my only net connection was wifi (which doesn’t exactly work well with a fresh install of non-SP2 XP), I had to call the toll-free activation number.
And now it is necessary that I provide a little flashback…

About a month before, I reinstalled XP just to freshen it up a bit, since some little things here and there weren’t quite working they way they used to.

Anyway, back to present time, I called to activate. I read the installation ID to their computer, and … it VERIFIED it instantly, even though it had only been a month since I last activated it! (See, the way things used to work, their system supposedly would allow you to activate it, no questions asked, if it had been at least 4 months since the last activation of that copy of XP — although it never worked that smoothly for me.)

So, now that I got Windows installed, I needed to install SP2 from my handy-dandy SP2 CD. But not minutes after it would extract the installation files, the installation could not continue because its files were corrupt for some reason. And this also happened the 2 subsequent times I tried it again. So I’ve decided I should replace my hard drive now, while I can still read the data on it, before it’s completely gone. And that means I may need to reactivate XP on the new HD, so I’ll let you know if it goes just as smoothly.