So I got a PC. Yes, a Windows box. I've been needing it for various little things lately and I'm tired of waiting for VPC for G5's to arrive.
Some random thoughts:
- XP boots fast. Really fast.
- Firefox is great on the PC too. :)
- PC's crash. Stuff doesn't "just work". I know I may have had an exception experience, but I've crashed several apps and black screened it all in the first few hours of running it.
- MS has put a ton of work into some XP features such as that sidebar thing on the side of file browser windows. Quite impressive and quite useless.
- I'm sick of little yellow popups.
- Does a PC know what "sleep" is? I want the sucker to be totally silent when it's asleep.
- I hate stuff that won't stay out of my tray. (the little dilly on the bottom right of the task bar)
- Windows Media Player sucks. Really bad. It's horrible.
- PC hardware is cheap.
- Remote Desktop is cool.
- Category View of the Control Panel sucks.
In general, it hasn't been to terrible of an experience thus far. Of course I like things about Windows, but after using it for a few hours, I sure am happy I have my G5 to turn back to!
Posted by brian at 06:49 PM
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ha, you really nailed it. Yellow popups SUCK. Why can't XP just leave its user alone and let him/her work?
And Explorer's sidebar really IS useless, i remember a time when all there was was 'properties" on the sidebar, to show the size of the folder and what not. Well its still there, but its defaulted to hidden. Instead, they have a little section with Copy, Paste, and other editing features that are not just available with key commands but with the menu bar AND contextual menu. WHY are THESE items the defaulty shown sidebar items, how about something that matters like the old PROPERTIES bar! myself.endRant(); phew...
Posted by: jon on April 13, 2004 7:33 PMI haven't tried XP, but I have 2k running on my gaming PC, it isn't half bad.
Posted by: Etan on April 14, 2004 6:45 AMYou can hide things on the tray permanently - see the start menu/taskbar settings (I also like a clean tray). You can silence the yellow popups forever with TweakUI. Get it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp
Also, as to silence during sleep - this depends on what cards you have installed - not all support deep sleep. Power Macs will have the same problems with some old SCSI cards. For what it's worth, my Thinkpad at work sleeps just fine.
Boot up time is deceptive. A better measure is how long it takes to boot *and* launch your first application. XP boots really fast because it's not loading half of the DLLs needed to fire up an app - just get Windows and Explorer up.
Posted by: Joshua on April 14, 2004 6:58 AMJoshua is right, my XP box at work boots like a banshee, but try to load an app right after login and you might as well go get a bagel and some coffee, cuz man, it just ain't happenin'.
Posted by: Brandon on April 14, 2004 7:35 AMImmediately wipe XP off your box and install Win2K. I've really found XP main changes simply to be an annoyance.
Just tweaking/configuring an XP box is a lot more hassle than XP simply because XP moves a lot of the settings/control panels/whatever to more remote places, and they all take a couple of extra steps.
Using Windows at this point is certainly not the exercise in futility that it used to be. But brother, wait until something breaks on it. Then you'll be Back Into Hell. And I don't mean the Meat Loaf album. :)
Posted by: W. Ian Blanton on April 14, 2004 8:49 AMYou know, I used to feel the same way about Win2K and XP. And if you have a Win2K system, there's almost no reason to use XP.
That said, there are some nice things about XP:
1) System-wide anti-aliasing.
2) Expanded driver support, including built-in WiFi support, support for immediate unplugging of Firewire/USB drives (no using "Add/Remove Hardware", Eject, or anything).
3) Better support for DirectX and games.
Really, once you turn off all of the crud (Fisher-Price interface, control panel "categories", funky start menu) then you get these advantages with essentially the exact same system as Windows 2000 (and no, the control panels and settings didn't really change at all, except for the aforementioned "categories").
Posted by: Joshua on April 14, 2004 12:22 PMDid you build it yourself?
Also, XP works much better on a machine that has an OEM version specifically tailored to the hardware.
Gen
Posted by: Gen on April 14, 2004 5:47 PM[quote]…and I'm tired of waiting for VPC for G5's to arrive.[/quote]
Wow, I wish I had your problems ;)
Posted by: Chris on April 14, 2004 6:40 PMWindows Remote Desktop is cool. but not totally cool, as many apps simply won't run over the remote connection, including my Artix4000 35mm scanner's driver (reports not enough video memory). And since this is the main thing i use my winxp box for it is v. annoying. Though it does use a whole lot less network bandwidth than Apple's Remote Desktop, and is included free.
The main thing i notice when i go over to XP is how bad the display looks without double-buffering and all the other wiz that apple has in 10.x (oh yeah and how fast browser windows resize).
Posted by: Alex Kent on April 16, 2004 6:04 AMTo get totally silent non-hibernation sleep to work on my PC, I had to enable S3 (Suspend to RAM) Sleep Mode in the ACPI Power Management Options in the BIOS. PCs generally default to S1 mode, which leaves the PC fans and hard drives on.
Sometimes, one little device can prevent the computer from sleeping, in my case, a particular usb joystick.
Posted by: Jeremy on April 23, 2004 10:54 PMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated.