Vista,

After a really rocky start, you and I are now getting along fairly well. In fact, I really find myself loving certain things about you. A lot. Of course, TweakVI has been pretty integral in getting me to love you the way that I do. But that's probably another story.

What do I love so much:
- Cleaner Audio/Video. I spend a LOT of time with Camtasia. In XP (on the same hardware), I couldn't immediately cut/splice a chunk of a video while editing and get XP to immediately play the newly mixed/mastered content without it sputtering and stammering. Although, I recognized early on that when that coughing/stammering/sputtering garbage was getting really bad that a reboot would always help improve things. As such, I always blamed XP - and hoped that Vista would do better. Amazingly, Vista has done a fantabulous job in this arena - saving me what has already, easily, amounted to a few hours of time.
- Distinct volume levels per application. It's a small thing - but it's also just plain cool to be able to set different volume levels for each application and for Vista itself. (Meaning that I can crank my tunes and if I encounter an exception/Windows Error, I don't need to go deaf.)
- Aero Glass. Yeah, 5 years was entirely too long to wait for this 'enhancement', but it's just plain spiffy.
- How stable you are. You've not bluescreened on me once. Yeah, a couple of my apps are more flaky with you, but you do a better job of handling that, and the few times that my shell has crashed, you've recovered marvelously.

What I find strange:
- Why you got rid of the programs in my start menu? No, I'm not complaining about the change to the start menu. That takes a tiny bit of getting used to - then it's fine. What I'm talking about is the fact that most of my installed programs no longer show up in my "All Programs" folder thingy. And the same thing goes with a couple of folders that I created to bunch/group some of my programs together - to save on space/real-estate in the folder lists. I've searched for KB articles, but I'm not getting any love. I'm sure it's just a glitch, but it is pretty annoying.

What I really don't get:
- What I really don't get is why you think that I'm that idiot kid from the Mac commercials. Honestly, I don't own a single hoodie. And I sure as hell wouldn't grow a soup-strainer on my chin. So why do you have to treat every single folder that I've created as if it only contains pictures or mp3s? No really, when I use explorer to nav into one of my folders, it's a bit goofy that everything always defaults to a thumbnail. Yeah, I've found myself getting used to that a bit - and, truth be known, it's growing on me a bit. Or, at least, it does look pretty cool most of the time - even if it's not that functional.
What drives me batty though, is that when I switch to details view, you're always listing crazy crap like: Name, Artists, Album, (Track) #, Genre, and Rating as column headings in Explorer. Trust me, some of the reviews and articles and content that I write I like much more than some of the other stuff I create. But I really don't need 5 happy little rating stars to help me keep all of that separate in my mind.
Even worse, I've gone in and replaced those attributes with things that I give a crap about (size, created, last accessed) and then told Explorer to apply that view to ALL folder views. But you just don't listen.
Which is ironic, because I'll bet that that 'hip' Mac guy's computer does that for him. Right?

What I've decided:
- Vista Business, amazingly, doesn't treat my like I'm some stupid college kid with nothing but images and mp3s/movies clogging my hard drive. So, since I'm still running the 'evaluation' version of Vista (thanks to this little gem), when it comes time to actually pony-up for your very over-priced license, I'll actually be swinging a copy of Business as there's absolutely NOTHING that Ultimate offers (over Business) that I need. Yeah, BitLocker looks cool, but it's way more protection than I actually need. That, and I really hate the way that Ultimate has been dumbed down to act like I'm only using my computer as a media machine. Not to mention, we all know that you 'Ultimate Extras' was the biggest load of crap since someone dreamed up the lie of 'Vista Capable' (your marketing folks truly have NO shame).

Peace out.