Tech Smartly

First and foremost, I have a contact page set up for those who wish to contact me. You can use it to send in  what you think I should write next, questions, tips, spelling mistakes, and things you feel you should point out to me. As what will happen with all blogs that get tons of email, there will be a point where I will not have enough time to reply.

Now, let me start off by saying that I don’t think my computer has ever felt more violated. My computer was in the worst state I’ve ever seen it since getting blue screens of death from the creative drivers (I still haven’t quite solved that problem). I don’t know what made me think it was a good idea. I’ve been starring at the same desktop ever since when XP came out, sometimes changing my wallpaper. If my eyes were a CRT monitor, the start menu would have been burned into my eyes by now. I guess my excuse is that I was getting bored at looking at the sae scenery all the time. At least now I know it’s better just to download a theme. It is important to mention that I used the Vistamizer program, which may have had issues with my computer. However, what happened to my computer after restarting was terrible, almost unmentionable. I wish I had screenshots, but I couldn’t bare to have my computer stay like it was long enough for me to take some. It all comes down to 4 things.

• It’s terribly slow.
• It’s ugly!
• Too many processes were running.
• It changed my stuff and didn’t revert it.

It’s terribly slow

Now of course, this is quite a heavy task. Maybe even Vista itself would be faster than what my computer was. However, I have a very powerful computer. It can run Crysis on high at a smooth framerate. So why does my computer have to slow down so much just to handle all the effects? When I right clicked, it took half a second for the computer to do whatever it was doing. At least I got to see a pretty circle while I waited! When I use normal XP, I don’t see any cool looking circle, I just see a menu pop up almost as soon as I click. How dare I decide that functionality is better than staring at a pretty circle!

It’s ugly!

Wait, what is this? It’s ugly? Yes, it is quite ugly! The transparency doesn’t look nice, especially with things in the background. There were a few miner graphical glitches. The taskbar colors did not look nice. It just did not work well together. It’s not just because I’m not used to it, it’s because it’s actually ugly. I wouldn’t be able to stand using it after a while. Even the default windows setup is better than what I experienced.

Too many processes were running

I realize that there needs to be a lot of stuff going on to deliver the vista experience on windows. However, when I find myself looking at new things running in the system tray, I do not like this. Maybe I was hoping for too much, but when I use a computer, I don’t want too many programs running in the background. On top of that, there were perhaps many other processes happening in the background. However, I didn’t look because I wanted to change back to normal windows so quickly.

It changed my stuff and didn’t revert it

The first thing I noticed is that I had a new desktop wallpaper. The second thing I noticed is that my files were spaced farther apart. Fair enough. I didn’t really mind this at all. In fact, it looked OK, and I didn’t have any problems with it. The problem I did have, and still have (since I can’t be bothered to fix it), is that when I uninstalled everything, it didn’t change back to what it was originally. All the icons are still as spaced out as ever, and the order that it was has ben destroyed. Not only that, it set the desktop wallpaper back to the default. I had a nice Firefox wallpaper that I can not find anywhere which I found through stumbleupon. How am I supposed to get that back? I’m sure I can find it through enough googling, but why should I have to spend quite a bit of time just to fix what Vistamizer changed?

Now this is only one opinion. For some people, Vistamizer might have worked perfectly. In fact, another vista pack could work better than vistamizer did for me. I don’t know until I try all of them (the popular ones at least). However, until then I think my computer wants a rest, especially through what it has been through.