So the venerable Alienware died the other day ( after furhter review it looks like it is either the raid card or one of the hard drives ) so I had to make an emergency purchase of a bland brand name computer at a bland local branch of a national chain store to get by while I figure out my long term computing strategy.

This new computer is a fine ( although very stripped down ) computer that would probably suffice for an average computer user – that is once you take the bloated Vista off it. Yes, since I had no choice it came loaded with Vista and since it was already on there I thought that I would fire it up and give it a chance.

Now, this is a modern computer and was sold as “Vista Ready” and had Vista loaded on it, so I am guessing that the good folks at the major computer manufacturer and at Microsoft thought that this computer could run this operating system. In reality, not even close. The operating system, a browser, and windows updates were using 100% of the CPU and the majority of the RAM, not leaving any resources for anything else.

And I haven’t even talked about how it looks! Ever since it launched all I heard about was how awesome Vista looks, that the Windows Aero was the main reason to upgrade, etc. To me it looks Clown Pants, I mean, how clean is Vista? There are allot of bells and whistles but does it look allot better then XP? Not really, it’s different, but I don’t think it’s better. Has Microsoft caught up with Apple in the look and feel department? Not so much, in fact I think that they have taken a step backwards.

Vista may appeal to folks that are used to looking at gaming interfaces but for those of us that prefer a clean, elegant look and feel that is conducive to getting things done – it’s not Vista imho.

So anyway, I formated the hard drive in this new computer, put in a dual headed video card, and installed XP.

And got back to work.