Well it had to happen sooner or later, I would have preferred later.

The computer that I built about eight years ago finally decided to become worthless.  Back when I built the now deceased one I could save a lot of money by purchasing the individual parts, i.e. case, motherboard, memory, sound card, etc. and assembling them myself.

Times have changed.  I checked on purchasing the parts and doing it again but that is no longer as valuable as it was in the past.  I found that I could buy a Dell for just about the same and I wouldn’t have to spend the time and (yes, even for a geek) the frustration of getting everything working.

I have also done something else that I had decided to put off for an extended period of time…Microsoft Windows Vista.  It looks great… all shiny and new.  Vista’s Aero features are just visually dazzling.  The new large flat screen monitor couldn’t be better.  However, all that said I still miss Windows XP, but only slightly.

It took a while but I even got important older programs working properly.  About the hardest part was getting my wireless network working with Vista.  I think it has too much security which made it complicated, but it does work now.  I easily got all of my previous documents transferred over to the new system thanks to a portable hard drive. 

Life is good so what am I going to complain about?  Well, so far, nothing.  I like it and intend to use it to the fullest.  If any of you have any tips for me about what you find to be useful new features, let me know.  I know that is a little backwards (me being the geek and all) but hey, even I can use a neat trick from time-to-time.

One of the first things I found to be much better than XP was the way the taskbar works.  Pre-Vista when you hover the mouse over the taskbar program buttons they would show you a text description of what is there.  In Vista you actually get a preview of the window that it represents.  What makes it even better is if something is moving in the actual window you will see it move in the preview.  For instance if you are watching a video and minimize the movie momentarily, just hover the button and you can watch the movie without opening it.

And then there is the efficient way the start menu works but maybe we will talk about that another time. 

Don’t forget to visit the new DoubleClicks.info site.  I had a lot of you sign up last week but no one left any comments.  I guess the reading is good but give me some of your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 5:16 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.