Pale Musings

Ok, so I was a Vista nay say-er. The truth is, there are still items that drive me nuts, but I’m getting by. There are some very nice things that Vista brings.

First, and perhaps one of the nicest, is the new hybrid sleep mode. Your laptop goes to sleep but does some intelligent writing of memory to the hard drive in the background. If the power gets low enough it will shut down as though you hibernated. Start-up is only slightly longer than waking from sleep. I like that.

Speaking of start-up, that process seems much nicer. Logging in also seems to become responsive much sooner than it did in XP. The programs that run on startup would appear to be given a slightly lower priority, but that is just my uneducated guess.

Gadgets! I love them! A colleague of mine and I talked recently about it so I took a screen-shot. It’s true that some of them are probably not necessary; however, they are cool! The gadget framework (based on IE7) seems to be fairly good on resource usage so I leave them running most of the time, even while playing Dungeon’s & Dragons Online. not bad! The only downside I’ve seen is that if there is a problem (like one of the battery monitors I tried) then it gets grumpy and closes. When it reopens it loses most of the saved data so you have to redo most of it. Not a big deal if you can track down the problem gadget and quit using it.

My favorite gadgets? Well, I love the Now Playing which integrates with Windows Media Player, WinAmp, foobar and more. WChannel is also nice for a weather forecast.