May I offer up a few thoughts?

- The problem with Vista is that there are a number of unnecessary programs running in the background, aka “bloatware”. (All operating systems have some bloatware, including Win7.) If you’re running Vista and it seems a little sluggish, the answer is to simply turn off the bloatware. It takes about an hour to do it right because you have to do a little investigative work. My guide for it is here.

- If you’re a geek and you like tweaking the heck out of the OS and you’re thinking of upgrading to Win7, you’d better read this first. It’s not a pretty picture.

- The bottom line when it comes to upgrading to Win7 is how your present machine works. If you’re running XP or Vista and everything’s working just fine, don’t touch a thing. You won’t ‘gain’ anything with Win7. As extensively covered in the above link, Win7 is a massively whittled-down version of Vista, and the big problem is that they not only removed most of the ‘fun’ stuff in Vista, like the Sidebar and the cool transparent windows, but they also removed a number of stock Windows programs that have been around for over a decade. Not only did they remove one of Windows’ best programs for the budding videophile, Movie Maker, but they also removed (and I hope you’re sitting down) their email program. That means you either get to use some ditzy online editor or you have to install one of the freebie programs, like Eudora or Thunderbird, none of which are as good as Outlook Express, renamed ‘Windows Mail’ in Vista.

And the sad thing about removing the email program is that, to many, email archives are today’s version of the scrap book. Those who won’t have the ability to install a replacement program and end up using an online editor will lose that continuity. Worse, trying to import your old email into a new program can be a bitch, sometimes taking a couple of programs and a bit of expertise. I imagine most people won’t be able to pull it off, and their little ’scrap book’ will be lost to the tides of time.

On a related subject, one real tragedy with Vista and Windows Mail is their dropping the ‘multiple identities’ feature that made Outhouse Express so great. I tried at least ten freebie programs and none of them pulled it off correctly. A few allow you to pick a different name in the “From:” box when sending an email, but all of the incoming mail to the different identities still comes in to the same ‘Inbox’. While it’s got a few bugs, the only one I found that did it correctly was a program with the goofy name of ‘The Bat!’, and it’s commercialware. If anyone’s interested, my review of it is here.

Me, I used Vista for a month and finally went back to XP. Overall, it worked just fine, but there were lots of little things that annoyed me, and since there wasn’t any particular reason for me to use it (like some must-have program that only worked on Vista), I said ’screw it’ and went back to a very quick and snappy XP system. For those of you still using XP, my tweak guide is here.

If anyone has any specific questions on Vista or Win7, cruise over to one of the first three links (Maggie’s) and ask in the comments. If you Win7 users are looking to clean up the system, many of the Vista tweaks (above) work with Win7, and there are a number of links for suggested tweaks and workarounds in the comments of the Win7 post, above.

Dr. Mercury on November 15, 2009 at 7:08 PM