The insurance company finally paid out on my broken laptop so I’ve finally been able to get a replacement.

It’s a nice bit of kit but it came with Vista, Microsoft’s most controversial operating system so far.  I’ve read and heard good and bad reports of Vista but so far I quite like it.

After a couple of days playing with Vista, here are some pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s

• It looks nice.  If you’re going to be staring at a computer you want it to look nice and with the Aero theme it’s the best looking version of Windows yet.
• The sidebar.  I know these have been around for ages and I’ve tried one or two but they don’t compare to one that’s integrated with the operating system and the radio player gadget I found it the dogs danglies.
• The Windows Switcher.  Pressing Win+Tab instead of Alt+Tab gives you the nice task switcher.  Again, it’s just eye candy but it’s something nice to look at.
• The “Games” menu.  Vista recognises lots of games and instead of adding them to the start menu it adds them to a nice Games menu which gives you the performance rating for your own machine and the required and recommended ratings for the game.

Con’s

• Age of Empires 3 doesn’t work.  It’s quite a recent game and a Microsoft game at that.  Is it too much to ask that a recent Microsoft game works with their latest operating system?
• Start Menu.  The new start menu sucks ass.  It’s all so confined with scroll bars and if you choose the “classic” start menu you get some antiquated Windows 2000-esque affair.
• Memory hungry.  Just displaying the Desktop needs about half a gig of RAM.

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