Friday, August 04, 2006

The overall windows experience. Week 2 on the new box.

This is a the first time I've used a windows machine as my primary box in a long time, (we have one for gaming at home, and I have a mostly unused desktop at work...

There's a couple things that are nice:


  1. Suspend and resume works, though this laptop has 2GB of ram and it suspends really slowly.

  2. It's nice to have media on all websites play back for a change.

  3. More open-source software seems to have been ported to windows and works well. GIMP, gnu dia, GAIM, slypheed, clamav etc.

  4. bluetooth is easy to setup, but it doen't really work all that well which is slightly disapointing. linux and bluez is rather harder but it's rock solid once you get it working.


Some things are not so good though...


  1. You still have to restart way too often... Either because you've installed some piece of software or a driver that requires it or because for whatever reason some piece of software generally part of the UI has become unstable.

  2. Sometimes software just mysteriously fails to install, or after installing doesn't work. There's muc more diagnostics for this in linux systems then there is in windows boxen. When you uninstall someting on a rpm package mangement based system you can be pretty sure it's all gone. that's way more ambiguous on windows.

  3. The initial load on this acer was horrible... some things I had no trouble installing on the Dell, Just refused to work properly (windowblinds). The system came with software to backup the image on the disk, but didn't come with installation media. reinstalling the os using an oem disk and the key on the bottom of the laptop solved that for the most part except some if the acer provided drivers (ati catalyst control panel) refused to properly install. not all the software (the cd burning stuff or the dvd player) were avaialble for download. norton antivirus which came bundled with it is junk and is now gone.

  4. Drivers for some of my older usb hardware (usb serial adapter) are now rather hard to find... these things for the most part just work on linux.

  5. Does somebody make a virtual window manger/pager for windows that doesn't crash, lose windows, end up with the same window on multiple pages unitentionally and fits someplace in the start-bar? cool-desk had lots of promise but it has all those problems. The windows powertools one install but now appear not to work (that problem again) and I remeber not liking it anyway. it's shouldn't be that hard a problem to solve.

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