New Laptop with Microsoft Vista Home Basic
by tdaxp ~ April 21st, 2007
Yesterday I set-up Lady of tdaxp’s newly delivered Dell Inspiron 640M, Intel Pentium Dual-Core laptop. Besides a conflict between Google Desktop and Windows Vista Home Basic Edition (over their useless gizmos), things worked out of the box. I removed most of the junkware on the Dell (AOL account signup, Earthlink account signup, etc), installed Mozilla Firefox with del.icio.us bookmarks, then iTunes, and we were off
I’m impressed with Vista. It’s a bit more than just another service pack, but nowhere near the improvement that Windows XP was compared to Windows 98, or Windows 95 was compared to Windows 3.11. It’s more like Windows 98 was to Windows 95, or even MacOS9 was to MacOS8.
At the time we ordered, Dell was shipping laptops with either XP or Vista. We chose Vista because Microsoft will slowly stop supporitng XP as an operating system. This isn’t particularly good for customers, but it’s the world we live in. So Vista’s kinda nifty, and Microsoft’s going to force us to use it anyway. That’s my short review of their new Microsoft operating system.
April 21st, 2007 at 12:00 am
“So Vista's kinda nifty, and Microsoft's going to force us to use it anyway.”
Actually, Vista has inspired me to use Linux on all of my future laptops. Wish there was support for Linux gaming so I could install it on my desktop too.
April 21st, 2007 at 12:00 am
Not to scrutinize your recent purchase, but is there anything about Vista that justifies the ram hogging?
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
Some more on new machines and XP/Vista choices.
I haven't had a chance to try Vista yet. I am too busy enjoying my Tiger.
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
“Microsoft's going to force us to use it anyway.”
Get a Mac.
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
On platform choices…
Linux is a non-starter because of lack of softare, Mac is a non-starter because of cost.
More broadly…
Linux cleaned up the server market because it was similar enough to all other unixes (HP-UX, Solaris, IBM's AIX, etc) that workers trained on another could rapidly switch over. If every Romance language except Spanish charged you money to speak it, it's a fair bit that Spanish would likewise displace Portuguese, Italian, French Romanian, etc.
That advantage doesn't help Linux against Windows, sadly. Product-leaders on UNIX (Gnome, OpenOffice, Rhytmbox, etc) are weaklings on, where the major players are now the Windows UI, Microsoft Office, and iTunes.
The best hope for free software is for major applications to be standardized (a true universal document format, a true universal web standard, etc), making it easy to transition over to Linux.
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
Oops, those links got filtered out. Here they are again in raw text:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/04/20/dell-offers-windows-xp-again-but-wants-you-to-buy-vista/
http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/5854