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okageryuuOk, so I've had Vista for a good while now and never gave it a good review. I've also used Chrome for the three or four days since it's been out and I want/need to review that too.
VISTA
It's an okay OS, but it's just that. It's okay.
It's got a bit more speed over XP (but that's because of the hardware, not the OS itself, I ran XP on a decent Acer Power machine, this one's a custom made gaming rig).
The searching, while good and VERY useful, is not all it's cracked up to be. For example, you need to reindex everything (yes EVERYTHING) if you delete a file and said deleted file still shows up in your search results. Indexing is known to be the culprit of many Vista problems (such as harddrive grinding and general slowness).
The interface does take some getting used to but it's good, and I seriously prefer this over XP's Luna...I got tired of looking at Luna after about a week. =/ Vista's Aero still makes me smile. Seriously, I've got no problems with this and I'm glad Windows 7 will most likely have this look as well. Flip 3D is rather useless, but I find myself using it over ALT+TAB most times. The transparency is neat, but it's just...neat, that's all. :X
I learned that Vista makes use of RAM better than XP, rather than use a small bit of your RAM, it uses the whole thing (even when you're doing something that doesn't use it all). If you're writing a story or drawing a pic using about 100MB, Vista uses the rest to cache things or index them or whatnot. This is what SuperFetch is, basically. It's a nice thing, makes me feel like I got my money's worth. When you need the extra RAM, Vista gives it to you (which is also nice). Yes, there's a slow-down to accompany this, but not as bad as it sounds.
Vista does have bugs, but I honestly haven't run into many. I've run into that Indexing one, the one where your icons change or disappear and you need to go into the Registry to fix them, and the bug with Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 9. The PSP9 one is particularly annoying since I use PSP9 to color (but I've gotten a few alternatives from friends, so I'll try those out).
As far as gaming, it's awesome. The only game that slows my system to a crawl is Second Life, but that happens for practically EVERYONE I know that runs it. Yea, I can run it 10x smoother than in XP, but watch out for lag. It can lag SO bad, it lags the system and I've noticed it tends to use BOTH of my cores to the max when this happens. Other than that, Crysis, HL2, TF2, Portal, and Bioshock all run fine on here. I've downloaded Dark Messiah's demo to try that too.
Vista has a nice habit of telling you when your drive is failing BEFORE it fails. Unfortunately happened to a friend of mine and Vista poked and prodded him over and over before it happened...and it was right. To my knowledge, XP doesn't do this. I've heard Vista also does this if your RAM is failing.
Overall, it's better than my XP machine by far (mostly due to hardware) but it's not a super godly OS and should not be thought of as that. The whole OS could use a tweaking by MS and I'm looking forward to Windows 7.
If you're getting Vista, check around forums. Know the bugs so you know how to (hopefully) fix them), know the right hardware, get SP1 (I'm not kidding...get it), turn off the Sidebar, and you should have little to no problems.
Most Vista laptops suck because Vista sucks on laptops (not the other way around). Vista was just not made to handle on a laptop. It's very clear by the specs you need to run it. Unfortunately, MS doesn't seem to care. They need to come up with a special Vista Laptop version or something.
If your hardware works on XP, there is NO GUARANTEE it will work on Vista, nuff said (it is also no guarantee it'll work on Windows 7 either). If you want Vista (or 7) you'll need to upgrade your hardware if it's a prebuilt XP machine (or if they've been in your PC for about 3 years), seriously.
(THere's something I'm leaving out here that I wanted to talk about, but I forgot. :|)
GOOGLE CHROME
It's a good browser, it's pretty basic and there's nothing really wrong with that.
My main concerns are two things:
1. What happens when it's finished? Will it slow down to Firefox's level (yes, it IS fast).
2. There are lots of bugs and exploits in it. It uses an older version of Webkit that Apple upgraded Safari from...Google hasn't said anything about upgrading the version in Chrome.
Chrome and Firefox live happily on my PC (IE7 was forced to move into the shadows), I switch between the two for browsing.
Another problem I have with Chrome is how it screws with FurAffinity. When you open a tab, it opens immediately to the right of the tab you're active in (unlike how in Firefox, it just opens to the right of the right-most tab). This is a timed thing, I've noticed. If you don't continue to click links to open in a new tab, they will go out of order (this is a problem if you're trying to open links to a comic page). The tabs will start immediately to the right of the active tab...instead of the right of the previously opened tab.
Also, it doesn't play well with FA's file naming system. I'm sure you all know how FA names their files with.... Well, if you just drag this file from point A (Chrome) to point B (Explorer, Desktop, wherever), instead of it being in that format, it'll be in .. That, I find is annoying since it messes with my saving of files.
There's also the part about no NoScript or Adblock Plus, but eh, those will come in time. The thing about Adblock is that Google makes a LOT of money from their ads. They most likely will not make this type of plugin (Chrome does not support extensions at this time), but someone else will. Chrome is opensource, it WILL happen. Google can't just block all other ads except thier own, that's called breaking anti-trust laws and that would be bad.
I like how you can resize the text wndow here (which is what I had to do in order to type this all out...it was annoying in Firefox), I also like how the tabs dance about smoothly where as they lag in Firefox. Aside from the problem with FA and tabs, I like how the tabs open in to the right of the active tab. It makes things more organized.
There's no memory leak that I can see in the browser, and it's definitely my browser of choice when on SL since it doesn't open slow when I click it like Firefox would.
Admittedly, this review is shorter than Vista's, but that's because I haven't used Chrome as long as Vista. I'm not going to bitch and moan about features missing, because I know they'll come later on most likely (and if not, eh). All I need is something that does Adblock Plus's functionality (and someone's already found a substitute in the form of a program for this) and NoScript. I'd be okay then, everything else I can get used to.
I understand that Google did not make this browser to go against Firefox, but I think that plan may backfire...not that they'd care. They have a partnership with Mozilla until 2011 and they have their own browser...they'll win either way.
So, if you want to try Chrome, go ahead. It doesn't require any hardware that I know of (you just need XP or Vista...sorry, no Windows 2000, Mac, or Linux (but Mac and Linux will be coming). It's a good browser that is constantly being worked on. Just, if you find a bug, let Google know.
This is all I gotta say today!
Don't start flaming over what I said about either things, please. e.e; I did not glorify Vista as it doesn't deserve it and I did not bash it as it doesn't deserve that either. I do think MS made a mistake on LOTS of things about it though (such as the fucked up new campaign...has anyone seen that...it's weird...and Jerry Sienfeld isn't funny.) I did not bash Chrome (as it would be incredibly stupid to do so to a three-four year old browser) and I did not glorify it as that's also stupid since it's so new.
I'll probably edit this later to add in that bit about Vista I forgot.
VISTA
It's an okay OS, but it's just that. It's okay.
It's got a bit more speed over XP (but that's because of the hardware, not the OS itself, I ran XP on a decent Acer Power machine, this one's a custom made gaming rig).
The searching, while good and VERY useful, is not all it's cracked up to be. For example, you need to reindex everything (yes EVERYTHING) if you delete a file and said deleted file still shows up in your search results. Indexing is known to be the culprit of many Vista problems (such as harddrive grinding and general slowness).
The interface does take some getting used to but it's good, and I seriously prefer this over XP's Luna...I got tired of looking at Luna after about a week. =/ Vista's Aero still makes me smile. Seriously, I've got no problems with this and I'm glad Windows 7 will most likely have this look as well. Flip 3D is rather useless, but I find myself using it over ALT+TAB most times. The transparency is neat, but it's just...neat, that's all. :X
I learned that Vista makes use of RAM better than XP, rather than use a small bit of your RAM, it uses the whole thing (even when you're doing something that doesn't use it all). If you're writing a story or drawing a pic using about 100MB, Vista uses the rest to cache things or index them or whatnot. This is what SuperFetch is, basically. It's a nice thing, makes me feel like I got my money's worth. When you need the extra RAM, Vista gives it to you (which is also nice). Yes, there's a slow-down to accompany this, but not as bad as it sounds.
Vista does have bugs, but I honestly haven't run into many. I've run into that Indexing one, the one where your icons change or disappear and you need to go into the Registry to fix them, and the bug with Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 9. The PSP9 one is particularly annoying since I use PSP9 to color (but I've gotten a few alternatives from friends, so I'll try those out).
As far as gaming, it's awesome. The only game that slows my system to a crawl is Second Life, but that happens for practically EVERYONE I know that runs it. Yea, I can run it 10x smoother than in XP, but watch out for lag. It can lag SO bad, it lags the system and I've noticed it tends to use BOTH of my cores to the max when this happens. Other than that, Crysis, HL2, TF2, Portal, and Bioshock all run fine on here. I've downloaded Dark Messiah's demo to try that too.
Vista has a nice habit of telling you when your drive is failing BEFORE it fails. Unfortunately happened to a friend of mine and Vista poked and prodded him over and over before it happened...and it was right. To my knowledge, XP doesn't do this. I've heard Vista also does this if your RAM is failing.
Overall, it's better than my XP machine by far (mostly due to hardware) but it's not a super godly OS and should not be thought of as that. The whole OS could use a tweaking by MS and I'm looking forward to Windows 7.
If you're getting Vista, check around forums. Know the bugs so you know how to (hopefully) fix them), know the right hardware, get SP1 (I'm not kidding...get it), turn off the Sidebar, and you should have little to no problems.
Most Vista laptops suck because Vista sucks on laptops (not the other way around). Vista was just not made to handle on a laptop. It's very clear by the specs you need to run it. Unfortunately, MS doesn't seem to care. They need to come up with a special Vista Laptop version or something.
If your hardware works on XP, there is NO GUARANTEE it will work on Vista, nuff said (it is also no guarantee it'll work on Windows 7 either). If you want Vista (or 7) you'll need to upgrade your hardware if it's a prebuilt XP machine (or if they've been in your PC for about 3 years), seriously.
(THere's something I'm leaving out here that I wanted to talk about, but I forgot. :|)
GOOGLE CHROME
It's a good browser, it's pretty basic and there's nothing really wrong with that.
My main concerns are two things:
1. What happens when it's finished? Will it slow down to Firefox's level (yes, it IS fast).
2. There are lots of bugs and exploits in it. It uses an older version of Webkit that Apple upgraded Safari from...Google hasn't said anything about upgrading the version in Chrome.
Chrome and Firefox live happily on my PC (IE7 was forced to move into the shadows), I switch between the two for browsing.
Another problem I have with Chrome is how it screws with FurAffinity. When you open a tab, it opens immediately to the right of the tab you're active in (unlike how in Firefox, it just opens to the right of the right-most tab). This is a timed thing, I've noticed. If you don't continue to click links to open in a new tab, they will go out of order (this is a problem if you're trying to open links to a comic page). The tabs will start immediately to the right of the active tab...instead of the right of the previously opened tab.
Also, it doesn't play well with FA's file naming system. I'm sure you all know how FA names their files with
There's also the part about no NoScript or Adblock Plus, but eh, those will come in time. The thing about Adblock is that Google makes a LOT of money from their ads. They most likely will not make this type of plugin (Chrome does not support extensions at this time), but someone else will. Chrome is opensource, it WILL happen. Google can't just block all other ads except thier own, that's called breaking anti-trust laws and that would be bad.
I like how you can resize the text wndow here (which is what I had to do in order to type this all out...it was annoying in Firefox), I also like how the tabs dance about smoothly where as they lag in Firefox. Aside from the problem with FA and tabs, I like how the tabs open in to the right of the active tab. It makes things more organized.
There's no memory leak that I can see in the browser, and it's definitely my browser of choice when on SL since it doesn't open slow when I click it like Firefox would.
Admittedly, this review is shorter than Vista's, but that's because I haven't used Chrome as long as Vista. I'm not going to bitch and moan about features missing, because I know they'll come later on most likely (and if not, eh). All I need is something that does Adblock Plus's functionality (and someone's already found a substitute in the form of a program for this) and NoScript. I'd be okay then, everything else I can get used to.
I understand that Google did not make this browser to go against Firefox, but I think that plan may backfire...not that they'd care. They have a partnership with Mozilla until 2011 and they have their own browser...they'll win either way.
So, if you want to try Chrome, go ahead. It doesn't require any hardware that I know of (you just need XP or Vista...sorry, no Windows 2000, Mac, or Linux (but Mac and Linux will be coming). It's a good browser that is constantly being worked on. Just, if you find a bug, let Google know.
This is all I gotta say today!
Don't start flaming over what I said about either things, please. e.e; I did not glorify Vista as it doesn't deserve it and I did not bash it as it doesn't deserve that either. I do think MS made a mistake on LOTS of things about it though (such as the fucked up new campaign...has anyone seen that...it's weird...and Jerry Sienfeld isn't funny.) I did not bash Chrome (as it would be incredibly stupid to do so to a three-four year old browser) and I did not glorify it as that's also stupid since it's so new.
I'll probably edit this later to add in that bit about Vista I forgot.
