Blogomyalgia

In late January of this year, about a week before Vista came out, I ordered my new Dell E520. 1.86ghz core 2 duo, 1gb RAM, ATI Radeon X1300 pro 256mb video card, 22" Dell widescreen running 1680x1050 res, and Vista Home Premium. I am coming from a Dell Diminsion 8400 running XP and Ubuntu Linux occasionally. I have taken quite a shine to Vista as it is very visually appealing. My system got a 4.2 out of 5 rating from Microsoft, and it has virtually no problems with software incompatability. 90% of the programs on there are from my old XP. There were a lot of games pre-installed, possibly a Dell fiasco. The regular games are on there (solitaire, spades, minesweeper, freecell...) but there are quite a bit more games on there that require a membership and so many 'tokens' to play, much like an arcade. With this I was heavily disappointed. I love that I can use a user account now as they have integrated a verification box when you run an executable file/installer. I also like the idea of a search box in the start menu. Rather than having to click 'search' to look for something, Vista has a little search bar right above the start button (not really a start button but a Windows logo) and it will start searching as soon as you start typing. You can even type the name of a program and hit enter to launch it. The 'all programs' that used to pop up in XP is gone and instead the programs come up in the start menu after you click 'applications' and appear in a scroll area compared to the window. This is especially helpful if you have alot of programs. I got a 250gb hard drive with my computer. Vista has a backup utility that had partitioned my hard drive to use as a restore drive. This is a capital idea, the only thing is that the partition was 9.99gb. How am I supposed to back up nearly 120gb of data (so far) on 10gb? Well...aparantly Vista doesn't know either and reminds me every time I boot up.Other than that, Vista seems great. I have not contracted any ETDs (electronically transmitted diseases) and am not running ANY anti-virus software of any kind. I know I should at least have it but not run it but i'm feeling brave in the interest of performance. My only major complaint now is that softare developers need to get on the ball with updating their products (ie: IOGear USB bluetooth adapter. when i run the Vista driver, it tells me I need to be running Windows Vista, no joke.)