Brain Fertilizer

I bought a laptop with Vista (Toshiba Satellite) because it was the best deal. I was hesitant because of all the complaints I'd heard about it, but just couldn't justify paying an extra $100 for slower/lesser hardware just to get XP.

I've used it for about 6 weeks now, and I have two impressions:

1) I don't get what all the complaining is about. Vista has run every bit of software I've tried, from old games designed for DOS and Win95 to new music editing software designed for XP, to XP freeware and shareware. The screen does occasionally go black and freak me out...but it lasts only a second and I'm okay with it. Not a single crash yet. No problem with digital rights management, either.

2) I don't get what all the excitement is about. The eye candy is just that: eye candy. I don't need my windows to float in space so I can flip through them like cards. I don't need preview windows popping up like bubbles. The new start menu is fine, but I was okay with the old one. To me, a completely average user, the change was pretty much a non-issue. Maybe security was improved, but I can't see that.

The only thing I truly like about Windows Vista is the cool "Aurora Borealis" (or whatever the name actually is) screensaver. It really reminds me of the real thing, and is hauntingly beautiful.

Side note: my wife's 2-year-old Toshiba Satellite still has significant and apparently unfixable bugs with the East Asian setting on the language bar. So it's not like XP had ever achieved anything close to perfection.

Bottom line: So much of what we do with computers is done so often it becomes a habit, a system. Thus, changing our habits for features that aren't clearly an advantage is annoying; changing our habits to deal with new bugs is even more so. That's the source of Vista complaints, I think.