thebrix
Mukhtar/is
Joined: 19 Aug 2005
Posts: 526
Location: London, United Kingdom
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I have been testing it for over 3 weeks, and have just overwritten it. I would strongly recommend anyone thinking of upgrading from XP to pause and think. (After February, there will be no choice in the first instance; you will be getting it anyway on a new PC).
It is underwhelming; in a sentence I would describe it as "five years to do ... what?"
Granted, it has a impressive new appearance on the surface, but there is no real feeling of anything being done fundamentally slicker or better. In fact, as a (former) user interface designer I note far too many errors and inconsistencies, some of which are cosmetic, others which are annoying and one in particular (too complex to explain here in words, but it is to do with the file save and open window, hardly a lightly-used component) which is just unbelievable; how it got through usability testing I cannot comprehend!
I also had a lot of trouble with drivers; everything more or less worked out of the box but I was plagued with video artefacts, the wireless keyboard and mouse kept losing contact and my network card had an annoying glitch where, if the PC was suspended, it did not wake up thereafter and the connection had to be "repaired".
The driver problems will be fixed in time, doubtless, as nVidia, Logitech and Broadcom (respectively) bring out new drivers, but the UI problems are another matter.
Rather than going back to XP, out of curiosity I downloaded OpenSuSE, installed it and was amazed - it is the only operating system I have ever used which auto-detected everything perfectly, which is even more surprising given that my PC is only two months old and has right-up-to-the-minute components. Good solid German (mostly) engineering I think; I may well go with it as some very interesting things are being done (and, more importantly, are coming up) with kde.
More importantly, I am having trouble working out where Microsoft goes tomorrow. It has spent forever producing a flawed behemoth, and I have a feeling that will finish off the days of the monolithic operating system (everything upgraded at once in one tremendous shot in the dark). |
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