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Windows Operating Systems Software

Pimp Your XP 272

Posted by kdawson from the old-dogs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ezinearticles.com has up an interesting article on how you can improve Windows XP to mimic and even surpass Vista — at least some of its new features. Several of the suggestions cost money and others are free. From improving the user interface with Stardock to mimicking new security features with open source software such as Sudown, the article discusses many ways that die-hard XP users can enhance their environment without moving to Vista."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Pimp Your XP More

Pimp Your XP

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  • That's all very well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by niceone ( 992278 ) * on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:01AM (#19618823) Journal
    ...but how do you simulate the hardware incompatibilities? I suppose you could get all your old peripherals a pour coffee in them, but I don't think that's really going to give you the same sense of frustration that you'd get with Vista.

    • Re:That's all very well... (Score:5, Funny)

      by blowdart ( 31458 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:34AM (#19618975) Homepage
      Well Stardock is fat bloated and heavy, so it will help simulate the slow down you may experience running Vista on your existing hardware.

      • Stardock is fat bloated and heavy

        Only if you use a fat bloated and heavy skin, in which case you deserve what you get. Some skins [wincustomize.com] are very, very easy on resources and performance. (They usually correspond to the ones that are easy on the eyes, too.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:That's all very well... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bsharitt ( 580506 ) <bridget@sharitt. c o m> on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:02AM (#19619109) Journal
      I've been running a copy of Vista Business I got for free, and I'm trying to get it to run more like XP. Any utilities for that, because Vista is runs like a dog. I disabled all the prettiness, but it's still slow.
      • Maybe you should try Vlite [vlite.net] from the maker of Nlite. With Vlite you can remove unnecessary features from Vista and also integrate drivers, tweak settings etc. Notice that this only useful for a new installation of Vista as you making a whole new installation media.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bl8n8r ( 649187 )
        > I'm trying to get it to run more like XP.

        If it's still running slow with all the eye-candy turned off, I'd say you've suceeded.

    • Re:That's all very well... (Score:5, Funny)

      by niceone ( 992278 ) * on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:46AM (#19619355) Journal
      I suppose you could get all your old peripherals a pour coffee in them, but I don't think that's really going to give you the same sense of frustration that you'd get with Vista.

      I've been thinking about this, and I think if you poured coffee into all your old peripherals and flushed $120 down the toilet, you might get pretty close.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )
      Run the 64bit version of XP... that has plenty of hardware incompatibilities to go round.

  • Why buy separate? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gravos ( 912628 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:01AM (#19618827) Homepage
    I'm not sure of the value of tacking on features to XP to make it more like Vista, especially when such features cost money. I mean, if you want Vista-like stuff, why don't you just pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead of a bunch of disjoint shareware utilities?

    • Re:Why buy separate? (Score:4, Funny)

      by blowdart ( 31458 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:36AM (#19618981) Homepage

      pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead

      You realise you're posting on slashdot, right?

    • because of the drm, spyware from microsoft, and the desire to never pay more money to threat-monger that steals ip itself and is a criminally convicted monopolist.

  • Humorous. (Score:5, Funny)

    by EveryNickIsTaken ( 1054794 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:05AM (#19618857)
    From TFA, first line:

    Just lately it seems to be the fashion amongst writers on the internet to compare and criticise operating systems.
    Joke article, right?

  • Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JamesRose ( 1062530 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:07AM (#19618865)
    The author mentions costs all the way through this article, this costs, that costs, and none of it is cheap. I got an OEM vista ultimate for £120 ($240) which from the looks of it is actually cheaper than the cost of pimping my XP.

    Not to mention, this is a hell of alot of software, I mean, he's talking about installing several toys that will run 24/7 and of course this is gonna sap your processing power, and its not integrated, so it'll probably end up using more resources than vista.
    • Sure makes me happy that things like Linux exist.

      $240? Chasing around a myriad of shareware tools? No thanks.

    • Re:Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:53AM (#19619389)
      Not to mention, this is a hell of alot of software, I mean, he's talking about installing several toys that will run 24/7 and of course this is gonna sap your processing power, and its not integrated, so it'll probably end up using more resources than vista.

      The creators of WindowBlinds are fighting this notion of "it's integrated so it takes less resource" really hard as of late.

      People seem to believe that if it's integrated, it should be better, but it's not the case. In their benefit, I downloaded and tried WindowsBlinds. It seems to indeed take less RAM and CPU than XP's theme compared (for simple themes). Then of course when you account for all the glows and transparencies running without DirectX who knows.

      One things though, it misbehaved a lot and lots of artifacts where the skin authors didn't account i'll use the skin in this fashion (such as put the task bar on left vs bottom). I wished hard it'd work, since I wanted to mod the default XP skin a bit so it has smaller titlebar and taskbar (and not blue). But, not good enough. Pitty.

      Looks like the best skin ever created by Microsoft is the Windows 95/2000 classic look, which I use now on XP, and will most likely use on Vista.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ravnen ( 823845 )
        My experience was exactly the same, but with Vista I'm actually using the Aero theme. One reason is that using the 3D hardware for the windows eliminates repainting when they're covered/uncovered, and having become used to this, I now find the old behaviour (in XP and older, as well as the X11-based systems I've used) irritating. OS X had this feature first, but I didn't like it for other reasons, so never used it enough to become used to this.

        Apart from using the 3D hardware, I don't know if OS X impleme

        • X11 systems support 3d hardware acceleration and with Beryl/compiz you have full 3d rendering of hte desktop. So, your point about X11 not being up to snuff is incorrect.

          Your point about OSX not having the hardware previously is also false. Macintosh computers, even those based on X11 have had 3d accelerated hardware for just about as long as the PC has. The reason is that it uses the hardware that the PC uses.

          As far as WDDM goes it is a gimmick and unnecessary done for the reason of making microsoft mon

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ravnen ( 823845 )
            I don't think you know what you're talking about. Scheduling of the GPU isn't the same thing as 3D acceleration, and full interruptability of GPU operations requires hardware support that isn't in pre-DirectX-10 GPUs.

            I'm sure you're trying to be helpful, but when you don't understand what you're talking about, it's actually just a nuisance. I would be interested to hear from someone who knows how the graphics system in OS X works, but sorry, I don't think that's you.

    • Free. Re:Cost? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by twitter ( 104583 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @10:39AM (#19620125) Homepage Journal

      Not to mention, this is a hell of alot of software, I mean, he's talking about installing several toys that will run 24/7 and of course this is gonna sap your processing power, and its not integrated, so it'll probably end up using more resources than vista.

      Vista is running all sorts of DRM on top of it's not very efficient or thrilling UI. The cost of adding a few skins is going to be less than that. Yahoo widgets along give the user a clock, weather and that kind of thing, without any performance hit.

      But really, the further you get away from M$ the better your computing gets. The real upgrades are free [slashdot.org]. Most of the visual elements have been available in the nix world for decades. The performance gain of moving to GNU/Linux is incredible and it can be had for less than 2GB of system files that auto configure and run live off a 650MB boot CD. Why buy car tweaks or a new car when you could just download a space ship for free?

    • Re:Cost? (Score:4, Informative)

      by HermMunster ( 972336 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @01:18PM (#19621439)
      That OEM version of Vista is now tied to your motherboard. If you had a retail version it would not be tied. If your motherboard goes and you do not replace it with exactly the same motherboard you have to pay Microsoft again for another copy of Vista probably running you another $240.00

      Yes, Microsoft changed their licensing on how many times that could be installed on a new motherboard and it relented, but they have never relented about OEM copies. You bought an OEM then you are stuck with it on that board. There are no options unless you lie...and who knows how much more effort MS put into ensuring you don't try to lie about moving that OEM license to another board.

  • So someone got the idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Xiph ( 723935 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:08AM (#19618875)
    to seperate userinterface from operating system..

    I mean, the article has a nice list of things you can do instead of upgrading to Vista,
    however the main principle that is highlighted has been logic to most developers for decades:
    1. Seperate logic from userinterface
    2. Seperate into small logical components

    3. you achieve better programs which are easier to maintain and upgrade. (which is often as good as profit)

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by value_added ( 719364 )
      1. Seperate logic from userinterface
      2. Seperate into small logical components

      3. Store settings in human-readable, human-editable configuration files so you can manage, control or otherwise reproduce them.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Cheerio Boy ( 82178 )

        1. Seperate logic from userinterface
        2. Seperate into small logical components

        3. Store settings in human-readable, human-editable configuration files so you can manage, control or otherwise reproduce them.
        Unless of course you want to change any of the modules in the Gnome screensavers because "screensavers that require settings are broken by default". :-(

  • Shell replacements? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bcmm ( 768152 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:22AM (#19618933)
    It seems that this article completely skips over the possibility of replacing Explorer with something less crap. I don't just mean the file browser, I mean the desktop, start menu, etc.

    • Re:Shell replacements? (Score:4, Informative)

      by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:31AM (#19618961)
      It seems that this article completely skips over the possibility of replacing Explorer with something less crap. I don't just mean the file browser, I mean the desktop, start menu, etc.

      You can replace the Windows shell with LiteStep very easily [litestep.com].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bcmm ( 768152 )
        IIRC it's just one registry change. If you only ever use one app on Windows, (not uncommon on /. I think) you can just set that as your shell.

    • Re:Shell replacements? (Score:5, Informative)

      by KermodeBear ( 738243 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @09:05AM (#19619445) Homepage
      Indeed. I used to change my shell every other week or so for a few months, just to try something new and tinker.

      I found that LiteStep was a PITA to use. Too much playing with config files.

      SharpE [sharpe-shell.org] was a decent and simple to use. Same with geOShell [geoshell.com].

      AstonShell [astonshell.com] is a nice shell with lots of features, but it costs money and it can't do anything that LiteStep can't.

      I tired BlackBox [xoblite.net] for windows when it was first released and liked it quite a bit. Very minimalistic.

      There is quite a lot of shells to choose from, though, sadly, not as many as there used to be. DarkStep was a stripped down LiteStep shell that I REALLY liked, but the maintainer abandoned the project many, many years ago. Seranade looked promising, but the site doesn't even exist anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jez9999 ( 618189 )
      It seems that this article completely skips over the possibility of replacing Explorer with something less crap.

      What exactly's crap about Explorer? I quite like WinXP's Explorer.

  • DirectX 10 Is The Difficulty (Score:5, Informative)

    by aldheorte ( 162967 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @07:41AM (#19618997)
    As the article admits, there is no current way to get DirectX 10 onto XP. Though the article makes a good point that there are very few DirectX 10 games on the market, they will eventually come and diehard gamers will face a difficult choice. This could be MS's only workable strategy for general Vista adoption because, fundamentally, there is no reason that anyone would want to use Windows anymore aside from games (or because of mandated OS at employer, though that situation raises the question of why the CIO hasn't be fired for gross negligence in funds appropriations, especially for Vista, which doesn't run Office 2000 any better than XP).

    On the other hand, maybe game developers will shy away from DirectX 10 because of the risk of losing a sizable market share. Diehard gamers could also prove finicky. Could this artificial attempt to tie DirectX10 with Vista to force upgrades result in a resurgence of OpenGL adoption in the gaming industry? One can only hope.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quarters ( 18322 )
      No, it won't result in a resurgence of OpenGL in the gaming industry. Vista runs both DX 9 and DX 10. If developers are uninterested in DX10 they will just use DX 9.
    • DirectX 10 is the only reason I'd install Vista. Microsoft has no plans to port DirectX 10 to XP and the general belief is it's part of their strategy to get people to upgrade. DirectX 10 is impressive but the fact it's married to Vista most developers are wary of designing for it. I briefly considered it then dropped the idea. It may be sadly backfiring since few are going to switch to Vista for DirectX 10 so it's hurting the new standard. I hope they are rushing to released a "fixed" version of Vista addr
    • http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

      From that site...

      "As a fitting start to this blog, I'm proud to release a preview of our Alky compatibility libraries for Microsoft DirectX 10 enabled games. These libraries allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Windows Vista, and increase hardware compatibility even on Vista, by compiling Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn't capable of running it. No longer will you have to upgrade your OS and video card(s)

  • But does it emulate Linux?

  • Very simple (Score:2, Insightful)

    by saibot834 ( 1061528 )
    1. Go to this [kubuntu.org] homepage, choose a mirror and download image.
    2. Burn image on CD
    3. Insert CD, follow instructions
    4. ???
    5. Profit!

  • Why Emulate Vista? (Score:5, Funny)

    by el_munkie ( 145510 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:13AM (#19619175)
    I tried the beta a while back and was unimpressed. Then, yesterday, I went out and bought a laptop with the intention of putting Ubuntu on it. It came with Vista Home on it. I gave it a chance while the Ubuntu installer was downloading. Holy crap, it actually got worse. It seems like they ripped stuff off from OS X solely for the sake of ripping it off. The sidebar that contains "gadgets" is a complete waste of screen real estate, with a distracting slideshow and a completely redundant clock a few hundred pixels above the taskbar clock by default. It was slow as hell, and the eyecandy made the machine grind to a halt. All in all, the interface was made less navigable and slower.

    The story has a happy ending, though. After Ubuntu's installer crashed and Gentoo proved to be a pain in the ass, I traded it in for a Mac.
    • Ever try turning off the sidebar?

      Or do you run *every* program that comes loaded with Ubuntu and never change its default settings, too?
      • From the sound of the article he doesn't run any programs that come with Ubuntu. He runs OS X. That being said, neither Ubuntu nor OS X has nearly the resource hogging apps running on an initial boot, so there's little reason to disable anything. I can't tell you how many requests I've been getting in my IT office for Mac's, mainly from people who are up for upgrades and have heard people bitching and moaning about Vista but loving their Macs. Mind you, most of these people already run Linux on a second

  • Stardock wins (Score:3, Informative)

    by Murrdox ( 601048 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:18AM (#19619193)
    I've been using Stardock's Windowblinds for 2 years now. Recently I started using some of their other interface changing tools as well.

    Windowblinds makes Windows XP SOOOO much nicer in my opinion. I wouldn't run XP without it. I love being able to customize my interface, change whatever I want, when I want.

    The community at www.wincustomize.com is fantastic, and people are always designing new skins, new backgrounds, etc.

    Stardock is fantastic. I love their products a ton.
     
  • Isn't that the game with numbers in rows and columns?

  • This does it for me... (Score:4, Informative)

    by FishWithAHammer ( 957772 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:40AM (#19619315)
    Yod'm 3D [chsalmon.club.fr]

    Beryl-style cube desktop on Windows. Makes using the inferior OS a little better.
    • I used YODM for a bit, but I was more impressed with TaskSwitchXP [ntwind.com]. It's not perfect, but it beats the hell out of the default ALT+TAB.

      There's also WinExposé, but it's buggy and slow if you have more than a few windows open.
    • I always think it's funny when sites that are trying to show off style in Windows put up something Apple related in a screenshot or photo. Even though some people bash it, it looks like some people like to draft behind the reality distortion field, the iPod halo effect, or whatever negatively connoted word is being associated with successful design and marketing.

  • Pimp my XP? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ferd_farkle ( 208662 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:43AM (#19619333)
    I read TFA.

    I learned absolutely nothing about earning money by putting my XP to work performing sex acts with others.

  • Cheaper Breadcrumbs (Score:5, Informative)

    by sjwoo ( 526878 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:53AM (#19619391) Homepage
    Can't go wrong with Explorer Breadcrumbs [minimalist.com] -- I'm using it on XP right now, and I don't miss Vista one bit.

  • Priceless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Stevecrox ( 962208 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @08:58AM (#19619415) Journal
    Output Firwall £20 (a year)
    Directory Opus £35
    Stardock £25

    Total cost of Pimping your copy of XP to look like Vista £80, the look on your friends face as you tell them you bought Vista Home Basic for £56 Here [overclockers.co.uk]

    Priceless

    In all seriousness why bother? The feature's discussed are all availiable in Home Basic and even if you compare this 'pimping' to the Home Premimum edition you can still get Vista cheaper (£70 at This site ) The only reason not to upgrade to Vista and doing this would be hardware incompatibility or your machine isn't capable of running it well (say you've only got 512mb of ram.)
    • Comodo Firewall is free, and it is to me the best software firewall for windows XP.
      Explorer Breadcrumbs is also free.
      Stardock is unnecesary eye-candy (I used it before but the only thing it really does is impress friends, and that only once).

      It seems you have drank the MS Vista Koolaid.

      What about software incompatibilities in Vista?
      Slower games performance in Vista?
      That XP is adecuate enough and much better supported by all vendors?
      That if I want to buy brand new hardware with a brand new OS I would prefer
  • FTFA:

    If you are hoping that I'm going to tell you now some way of getting DirectX 10 to work on Vista, you are going to be disappointed.

  • XP? Y'all from the future? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @09:39AM (#19619679) Homepage

    I have a fully licensed copy of Win2K Pro that I have faithfully moved from machine to machine for the past 7 years. It doesn't require registration, is rock solid, and does everything that I need it to do as well as XP or better, including software development and gaming.

    I'll update from 2K when my disk and all the backups rot (must remember to take another), or I absolutely need hardware that absolutely won't support 2K. Until then, as far as I'm concerned, Microsoft peaked 7 years ago, and it's been all downhill from there.

    • Agree 100% (Score:3, Insightful)

      by walterbyrd ( 182728 )
      I dual boot debian and w2k. W2K is fast, secure, reliable, runs all my hw and sw, and has none of that authentication cr@p. Why people would bother with XP, much less Vista, is beyond me. Do people like bloat, or a fisher-price interface, or the authentication nightmare, or having to learn a new UI, or just giving msft more money?

      I dunno, maybe it's just gamers?
    • Even after all modern hardware stops having Windows 2000 drivers, the operating system still has plenty of use. Why?

      Because of virtualization.

      Windows 2k runs MUCH better in Parallels or VMware than XP does- there is not the hint of sluggishness. Plus it does not require activation (great for having many different virtual machines on the same system) and it works with almost every application that XP does (cept for some things you don't want to virtualize like games).

      Every since I got my Macbook, my Windo

  • By the time you buy the new firewall sofware, Opus et al you'll have spent the equivalent of buying a Vista Ultimate license and just sitting on it until at least SP2.

  • Vista Transformation Pack (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Enderandrew ( 866215 ) <enderandrew@@@gmail...com> on Saturday June 23, 2007 @10:12AM (#19619935) Homepage Journal
    Not a mention of the Vista Transformation Pack [windowsxlive.net] in the article?

    The VTP makes XP look like Vista, doesn't slow down your computer, and is free. It includes several freeware apps such as a Sidebar, a Start Orb, etc. It is really polished the new version is supposed to be released Monday.

    You can also get Vista games [wordpress.com] on XP.

    And with KDE being ported to Windows with KDE 4, you'll also be able to get both Konqueror and Dolphin on XP if you want to try another file manager without shelling out $70.
    • I tried this after running Vista Home Premimum on my desktop I wanted my Laptop (running XP MCE 2005) looking similar. Graphical glitches were everywhere, the worst case was with the start button, occasionally the circle would place itself infront of everything, lose textures and sometimes would disapear. The vista Transformation Pack also had a huge drag effect on my laptop sure it didn't use more resources but the system response times went into the toilet. To cap it off I couldn't get the thing uninstall
  • If you're going to waste your time, you may as well make it fun.

    http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/ Themes/FlyakiteOSX.shtml [softpedia.com]
  • ...because when I install XP, the first thing I do to pimp it out is turn off all the Fischer Price stuff in order to make it look more like Windows 2000.

  • The real list (Score:5, Informative)

    by Amadawn ( 43796 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @11:49AM (#19620661)
    No offense to the author, but the linked article is barely informative. I don't even know how this made it to the front page. But

    the subject is interesting, as there is a bunch of cool freeware software to make XP be like (or even better than) Vista. You

    don't need to spend a single dollar. So this is my real list of programs to Pimp your XP:

    1. Lauchy: www.launchy.com
    Some may say that this is the poor man's QuickSilver. Maybe it is, but in the Windows world there are few programs as useful as

    Launchy. Install it and you won't need to access your start menu anymore.

    2. Quizo's Explorer toolbars: http://quizo.at.infoseek.co.jp/freeware/indexEn.ht ml [infoseek.co.jp]
    These are 2 free toolbars that make Windows Explorer as good as Directory Opus (IMHO) for free:
    * QTTabBar: Adds firefox-style tabs to windows explorer. It also adds a cool incremental search feature, and a customizable

    toolbar where you can add folder shortcuts, etc
    * QTAddressBar: Explorer breadcrumbs!

    3. FileBox eXtender: http://www.hyperionics.com/files/index.asp [hyperionics.com]
    This is one of the most useful little pieces of software that I've used. I adds 2 buttons to the title bar of every windows dialog

    and of every windows explorer window. One button gives you access to your "favorite folders" (which you can easily change) and the

    other one gives you access to your "folder history". With these, going back and forth between folders to open or save files

    becomes a snap. The only problem is that the default button icons a kind of ugly, but they can be easily changed.

    4. Findexer: http://tomseffect.com/ [tomseffect.com]
    Substitutes the windows explorer sidebar for a place where you can put links to your preferred folders. If you use FileBox

    eXtender (see above) this might not be as useful, but I still like to use it.

    5. TaskBar Shuffle: http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.ht m [freewebs.com]
    Another really useful program. With it you can reorder the window buttons in the windows taskbar. It can even automatically group

    windows from the same program without collapsing them. You can also reorder the tray icons in the system tray.

    6. Free Launch Bar: http://www.freelaunchbar.com/ [freelaunchbar.com]
    Make the windows Quick Launch bar much more useful with this free replacement. It adds the ability to have folders inside the

    quick launch bar, and have shortcuts within those folders.

    7. LClock: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Enhancements/ Clocks-Time-Management/LClock.shtml [softpedia.com]
    A nice replacement to the windows clock in the system tray. It looks much better and is more useful as it shows a calendar when

    you click on it. But the reason I recommend it is that it can also hide or reduce the size of the start menu button! Once you

    start using Launchy (see above) you will not use the start menu very often, so I like to recover the taskbar real state that it

    uses unnecessarily. To do so, with LClock you can reduce it by substituting the start menu image with a much smaller one.

    8. MenuApp: http://www.freewaregenius.com/2006/11/02/menuapp/ [freewaregenius.com]
    Customize the explorer context menu with this tool. It comes with a lot of built-in actions, such as Command Prompt here, Create a

    Folder, copy filename to path, etc.

    There are other tools that you can use, but which I personally don't (although I've tried or used them in the past):

    1. RocketDock: http://www.punksoftware.com/rocketdoc [punksoftware.com]

  • Vista is the Bizarro XP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @11:57AM (#19620727)
    Security
    "....the new security measures, specifically User Account Controls."

    UAC is useless and annoying. It might be fine for my Aunt Mildred, who only turns her computer on a couple of times a week to surf the web for a few minutes and send one or two e-mails, but for anyone who actually want to get things done, Vista is virtually unusable unless you turn off UAC. In the long run, UAC will make things worse because clueless users, who have absolutely no idea whether foobar.exe is a legit program or malware, will simply start clicking 'Yes' to everything.

    Windows Explorer
    "Windows explorer featured several significant upgrades in Vista."

    WTF? Numerous features in the XP version of Windows Explorer have been removed or changed in ways that make them less useful. Customize the toolbar? Gone. In fact the whole Toolbar is gone. Status bar shows total size of all the files in a directory? XP yes. Vista no. The list goes on.

    Search
    "Windows Vista's integrated desktop search is one of my favourite new features"

    Purely a personal preference, Desktop search is meaningless to me. I have thousands of files in dozens of directories and rarely need to use search to find them. In all fairness, XP's search is so horrible and less than useless, that anything will seem better.

    Look and feel
    Look - don't care.
    Feel - Vista feels slow and clunky on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP with 2 gig of RAM. It only feels slightly better on my new dual-core 2.8ghz machine with 4 gig RAM.

    Media Center and Games
    Vista doesn't really do anything that's better than XP. And that's the real problem with Vista. People have long knocked XP as nothing more than a fancied up Windows 2000. And there's some truth to that. But, everyone forgets that when XP first came out, most people were running Windows 95/98 -- quite possibly the two worst pieces of crap software ever created. XP represented a major improvement. Vista, in many ways, is a giant step backwards.



    • most people were running Windows 95/98 -- quite possibly the two worst pieces of crap software ever created.

      Actually, you seem to have forgotten about Windows Me, which really was the, "worst piece of crap software ever created." Sadly, I think Windows 98 could technically qualify as an, "upgrade," from Windows Me, so anyone going from Me to 2000/XP would definitely be getting a huge increase in performance.

  • ...do yourself a favour and buy a Mac.
  • Research shows that most pimps live with their mothers in order to pay the rent. They also fail quickly if they mess with the merchandise. The ghetto worship that leads to this terminology has everything backwards.

  • Getting XP to look like Vista is easy (Score:3, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday June 23, 2007 @12:35PM (#19621035)
    1. Download theme (optional)
    2. Remove half your ram.
    3. Clock the CPU down by about 20%.

    Where's the big deal?
  • how you can improve Windows XP to mimic and even surpass Vista

    I think you have that backwards. You don't have to do anything to get XP to "surpass" Vista. It retroactively surpassed it when Vista was released.
  • I pretty much stopped reading after the first line that said, "Just lately it seems to be the fashion amongst writers on the internet to compare and criticise operating systems."

    "Just lately?!" Seriously?! WTF?! Just about every real geek knows that we've been comparing and criticizing each other's operating systems pretty much since the dawn of the computer age! And anyone that denies it should turn in their geek card immediately!

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This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks.

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