The Laptop and Windows Vista

Just had to break the line of unimportant updates. Finally, after years (ok, actually months…well hmm…weeks) of waiting, my new laptop has just arrived. The first time ever that I decided to get a Dell. The model is a XPS m1330 that has decent power (Core 2 Duo T7500, 2GB RAM, nVidia 8400M GS graphics card, white LED display,…). The hardware, in my opinion, is really ok, but it kinda sucks that Dell does not offer the XPS models with Linux. They all come with Windows Vista. So this is the first long-time experiment that I’m trying to make friends with the new operating system by Microsoft.

The very first thing I did after completing the installation of Vista was that I disabled all these annoying effects – I really hate those. m1330

What I need is a clean interface to work, not hundreds of fancy widgets wasting space, power and my time (that means that I have to wait for the oh-that-is-so-awesome effect to complete its animation).

I find it kinda funny that when an application crashes, Windows proudly presents a dialog that says that the application crashed and it’s looking for a solution, with a loading bar that keeps proceeding and never results in anything. At least in all my cases it didn’t. Nearly all of the crashes were caused by the Windows explorer itself.

So after disabling all the effects and Aero stuff, I installed Waterstorm which turned out to work as expected, fortunately. A thing I really got angry about was the wifi connection. It happens a lot that I send the laptop to sleep (hibernate) and then wake it up again at some other location where another wireless network is available. It takes minutes of frustration until Windows is able to really use the new connection, although it says it’s connected within a few seconds.

It seems that I have to wait for the next patch day – there may be hope. Ah, one weird thing left. The laptop has a fingerprint sensor that you use for logging into the system (btw, when registering my fingerprints, I thought of some guys at the CIA or somewhere that I really made happy with my decision). However, I’m faster at typing my password to log in than the sensor is able to recognize my finger correctly. I’m so glad that it can be used as a scrolling device, too…