Sure if I were alive at the moon landing, I’d say wow, hell if I saw a moose on the road I’d say Wow, but over the past few days of using Vista, not once have I had the urge to throw out a good Wow. I’ve probably raised my eyebrows with an impressed expression, but only once so far.

Now the fact is I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy, always have been, I started on a Mac so it’s only natural. “Why do you have a shiat Windows box then?” I hear you ask. A few reasons, like it or lump it Macs don’t have even close to a decent selection of games, Desktop Macs are WAY more expensive than what I can build from scratch, and lastly my job is working in an all Windows environment, I have to keep up with the happenings. Now because I’m a fanboy I generally harumph at a lot of Windows features, and this won’t be any different, but I’ll try my best. Here’s just a quick run through of the goods and the bads I’ve experienced to date:

So I installed Windows Vista Business edition a few days ago. For starters the installation process on a fresh hard drive is quick and painless, and very fast, a lot less messing around, so Vista was off to a good start, once everything was up and running It found all but 2 of my drivers, my graphics card and my wireless adapter, this took much longer than usual because I’m shaped by my ISP at the moment so my internets are sucking right now. Once I got the drivers on I setup the right resolution on my screen and had a bit of a play with the new look theme, Aero, I must say it’s pretty…pretty, but eye candy will only get you so far.

Now the feature they always show off on the tv is the super fancy application switcher, you launch it via the quicklaunch bar and you get a nice 3D style layout of your windows which you can pan through (*cough…crappy version of encore..cough*…sorry). It doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose other than to look pretty in front of your mates that don’t yet have Vista.

One thing I did notice when using Vista is my hard drive was clunking away like crazy, and was pissing me off to no end, I sussed out that it was obviously indexing all my files for the only real handy feature I’ve seen on vista, and that’s the new start menu with real time searching (*cough..spotlight…cough*…I know) Press the Windows key and you can start typing straight away, and you can use it to launch any application, document, path, website whatever, it’s incredibly fast once you get use to it, and I already use it all the time. The indexing did stop after a while thankfully, but it cranks back up again when I install anything. I’m sure my Mac does the same thing with Spotlight but I don’t notice it at all because the hard drive is relatively quiet, and there’s no HD LED, sneaky devils.

The next big feature that I found quite shit and useless is the “Sidebar” with it’s various “Gadgets” I’m not gonna hide this one, it’s a pathetic rip off of “Dashboard” and it’s various “Widgets” but it’s clunky, hard to get around, and it sits there as a third party application in your system tray just inviting you to exit, which I quickly did.

I don’t particularly like the new network control panel, it seems over simplified, but I think over time I’ll get use to it.

I’m yet to install all my favourite apps and games to it yet, but if they don’t work I’ll be rather pissed. The main thing that pissed me off the most is the turned on by default security features, it’s like some nagging mother questioning you every time you wanna scratch your ass, it pauses when you launch an app, change a preference, run a particular control panel, and it’s not subtle, the whole screen flashes black and the cancel or allow options appear. It’s just like that Mac ad that’s going around. The upside is you can easily turn it off and it bothers you no more.

The last thing that I must say about Vista, being the Mac fanboy that I am, is the save dialog, I’m sorry but it’s just a filthy rip off and it annoys me to no end, it’s just like the Mac OS save dialog, and the most annoying thing is I hate the Mac save dialog, I much prefer the old Windows method.

So I’ll probably stick with Vista for the time being, provided all my apps work and whatnot, but out of all the hype and craziness I’ve only found one feature that’s kinda innovative, and that’s the instant search in the start menu, so really just innovative within the realm of Windows, but pretty damn good all the same. The rest is just….the same, or just not good. Maybe it would run better on a beefier system, but it should run pretty damn well on a Athlon 3000+ 6600GT and 1.5gig of RAM right?

When you’re a tech nerd working or living with the not so tech savvy, there are a few things they tend to do that make you bite your tongue, and resist the urgh to take over what they’re doing and get it done yourself. They may be trivial, but they are all oh so wrong.

1: Microsoft Word is the application for everything.

Some people have been using the basics of MS Word since Windows 3.1, and have never wanted or needed to learn to use anything else, but they seem to think that Word is for full desktop publishing, database management and photo printing. They may even have the full suite of Office with Publisher and Access, but no matter what the task, Word will do it. Taking the long route seems to be the way to go, for example in order to print a picture, launch a new Word document, insert a text box, then insert the photo, you can then move the picture around and resize it to whatever size you like, which brings us to the next itch.

2: Incorrect Aspect Ratios.

Whether it’s on a new Widescreen TV, resizing photos in Word (of course), or using soome spyware riddled DVD ripper to rip a movie, some people just seem to have no concept of aspect ratio, they don’t seem to mind if Captain Jack Sparrow looks George Costanza with a pirate hat. The amount of bars and pubs that have gone all out to buy their plasma/lcd TVs to hang on the wall, only to run the footy in standard analog stretch to fit nastiness astounds me. Try as you might to explain 16:9 and 4:3 views, the problem continues.

3: Everything Must Be Double Clicked.

It’s quite hard to explain to a not-so computer literate person the difference between icons, buttons and links. They sit there happily browsing the internet double clicking on all the links like they’ve had too much coffee, it’s a habit that cannot be broken, you can tell them as many times as you like that you needn’t click like crazy to view that video on Youtube, but they will continue with their clicky ways.

4: Getting a faster computer will speed up the internets.

Off to the closest Harvey Norman to pick up the top of the line HP Desktop with all the trimmings, they hand over all their cash, take it home and get there 13 year old son to plug it in. Then you get the phone call or chance meeting where they question you on why the internet is still slow as buggery, even with this fancy new computer. “What type of connection do you have” you ask them, so naturally they tell you their ISP (Usually Bigpond, or AOL for the US readers), you slowly explain what you mean by your initial question, and 15 minutes later come to the conclusion that they have dial-up. You try and hold it back, but you can’t, you just cry.

5: I won a trip to the Bahamas!

No, no you didn’t

6: Your desktop wallpaper is NOT your screensaver.

I’m not quite sure how word got around that a desktop wallpaper is the same thing as a screensaver, but so many people seem to get the two mixed up. They can be talking about the background on their phone, or the background on their computer, they keep calling it a screensaver, why? I don’t know how this spread around the non-tech savvy world but it needs to stop, before my eyes start twitching and my head explodes.

7: NO, I DON’T want to fix your cousin’s brother’s uncle’s 10 year old computer.

This one is talked about a lot, hell there’s even t-shirts about it, but it needs to be said. If you’re a tech-savvy person, especially if it’s what you do as a job, people seem to think that you enjoy, and are happy to fix their computer. It’s true, yes we do enjoy a little bit of tinkering every now and then, but it’s a hell of a lot more fun when it’s your own machine, for a start the only person you can piss off is yourself if you manage to screw up, and on top of that, it’s YOUR computer so YOU get the benefits of the upgrade/maintenance. old computers are a bitch, working with old technology (unless it’s 1980s retro) is a bitch, and we don’t like doing it for free. I have no problem doing it for immediate family, and very close friends, but I do not want to get a tech support call from a work colleague’s boyfriend at 8:30 on a Saturday morning (that actually happened to me I might add).

8: The Non-Tech Savvy Geek

There are breeds of human out there who are convinced they are super tech gurus, they’ve sussed out Microsoft Office, and they can program a VCR with their eyes closed, and to top it off, they can talk for hours about stuff they know nothing about, using words they don’t understand. These guys are annoying as hell, and they are dangerous too. If you work with one, they can mess up a whole morning’s work at the blink of an eye. And even more annoying, they always give the other non-tech savvy people false hope, by telling them something is possible when it’s absolutely not, then you cop the bad wrap because you can’t do what they were told was possible. “No I can’t configure your phone to charge via bluetooth”

9: Why can’t I open this file on my floppy disk?

This one isn’t super common but it’s definitely happened to me a few times. Some people store all their important documents on a floppy disk, arguably one of the most unstable storage methods available bar writing the binary data in sand on a beach. So surely they have backup yes? No, no they don’t, you express sympathy on the outside, but really, you’re shaking your head muttering “you complete idiot”

Yes this list is pretty self righteous, a mechanic or farmer could write a similar list directed at people who know bugger all about their profession, and they probably would, but they can’t work out how to turn on their computer.

Over probably the last 6 months I’ve been making use of Digg.com to get all the stories that I would never previously see or think to look for. I’ve got it on my Google IG page and I find myself refreshing constantly in wait of the latest story. It has a great user moderated commenting system, and has a very good community of regular users. One thing I find rather strange however is the lack of an official forum. The comments on Digg stories usually stay active for just a couple of days, the site moves too fast to keep a thread going for weeks on end. Forums would be a fantastic way to keep the community going outside of a particular Digg story. It would definitely be a very different forum to any other, since any thread that links to a story would be pointless. So would a user moderated official forum work? I’d like to think it would.

A little bird deep in the retail industry the other day mentioned to me we will see an Australian official Apple store as early as December. All “Apple Centre’s” in Australia have received word that they will soon not be able to use that term (store’s like NextByte call their stores Apple Centres). One can only assume that the first Apple store will be in Sydney somewhere, possibly on the roof top of the Opera house, if any of the other locations are anything to go by, I guess Melbourne is in for a small chance, Fed Square, the ball room at Flinders St Station would be a mad location.

Not sure how accurate this prediction is, but I’ll get a little excited. I was lucky enough to go to the Chicago Apple Store a couple of years back and it’s to this day the most stylish, friendly and cool shop I’ve ever been to.

I discovered a new Multi IM app today, Fire was just getting damn annoying with it’s constant beach ball and lack of decent Google Talk support. So I went with Adium, and hell I’ve been missing out, it looks SO much better, I get no beach balls, the default sounds resemble a dieing chicken but they have their charm, Google Talk works, and it supports the images on MSN, awesome. I thought my desktop was looking rather pretty too so I took a nice screenshot.

DeviantArt.com is still the best place for wallpapers out there.