hooray for new computers

My new toy arrived last night - a nice new thinkpad (see it spinning in space here). So far it's nice and quiet and just what I wanted, except as it turns out 1GB of RAM is not nearly enough for Vista. Holy cow is it not enough. I don't know why anyone in their right mind would choose vista over, say, an operating system that didn't chew up all the memory in the world. Crazy. But overall this new laptop experience has been a whole lot better than last time.

I sure hope it works - I have one too! Ok, not quite - mine is a Series 3000. Ken really wants to take Vista off and put XP on so it is faster. But my desktop is so slow, that even with Vista it is still faster... So far, only one problem - it thoroughly froze when trying to do an automatic Windows update (or maybe when trying to hibernate? We're not sure)

You should be aware that you can request a copy of XP from lenovo for free (it's a free 'downgrade'). I'm probably not going to do it, because I have 4GB of RAM coming for mine, and that combined with SP1 should make it acceptable enough.

Do me a favor and once you've been working with Vista for a while, let me know what you think of it. Thus far, everyone I've talked to hates it, but by and large those have been non-technical folk.

Well, I can already say a few things - I've been running Vista Ultimate on my gaming PC for a couple months. I turned off (using a tip I found in a magazine) the user account security. I deactivated gadgets as soon as I installed the system. They're nowhere near as good as the mac version. It eats RAM like it's going out of style. And with my 10K disk it seems to spin a lot - I can't imagine it caching with 2GB of RAM, but the disk seems to thrash from the moment the system boots. This is a clean install - no crapware (my lenovo has quite a bit). I'm sure there are some good changes made, but I haven't seen one. Some pseudo-pretty (I have DX10) but even that isn't as cool as the mac, and I don't even have 10.5 yet. Overall, if you can avoid it, I'd wait until at least SP1, probably SP2. With XP SP3 coming, there's absolutely no need to upgrade.