It seems that Vista has become more of a "Do you have a CD key?" thing. The software itself seems very easy to obtain but Microsoft seems quite confident about deterring piracy. But who knows?
As for me, I'm not sure if I want to leave XP or not. From my experiences, Vista is a HUGE resource hog.
I have to agree here. XP's icons just look childish and unprofessional, but the Longhorn/Vista ones are nice, clean, sleek and much more professional.
Definitely - the XP icons fit in with the whole child's toy theme that seems to run throughout the whole of XP. XP is a really good OS, it's such a shame that they made the interface look like it was designed for 3 year olds, as so many people seem to just use the default theme and wallpaper and everything! I've actually removed pretty much every XP-style icon from my XP, I dislike them so much, by ResHacking shell32.dll, all the Control Panel applets, and the icons on the Explorer toolbars that are in shell32.dll. I use mostly Vista-style icons, with a few OS X ones, for example:
In some ways, I actually prefer my tricked-out XP Explorer (without that huge bar that is down the left hand side of the Explorer windows by default, of course) to the Vista one. My Start Menu certainly has better icons than the shoddy mess of inconsistent, mainly old-style, icons in Vista's Classic Start Menu, as well as a proper resolution image up the left-hand side!
Yes, I agree, your XP looks really pretty. I have many XPize/Vista/MacOSX icons integrated into my XP install as well. For some time, I have also used "Inexperience", which replace all the XP-style graphics and icons with the ones from Windows 2000, which were better than the XP ones IMHO. But as that began to cause more and more trouble, I stopped using it and began to use icons that I'd downloaded from many free icon sites, but many were in a Mac style. Now that Macs are my primary machines, I fortunately don't have to care about my icons anymore...
Now that Macs are my primary machines, I fortunately don't have to care about my icons anymore...
Very true I think we can definitely conclude something from comparing the number of Windows users that do everything they can to make XP look as much like a Mac as possible, while the number of Mac users working to make OS X look like Windows is very very small indeed
Another good thing about Mac icons also seems to be that 3rd party programs for OS X also always have beautiful icons that look good at any size, while a lot of Windows programs are still produced with really horrible Win95 icons, both as their shortcut icon and in the dialogs inside the application, which look absolutely awful if you use the Tiles view in XP. Somehow a program just couldn't get away with low-res icons on OS X, but no-one seems to care about bad icons for Windows programs. It really annoys me as some of them are so ugly!
Very true Smile I think we can definitely conclude something from comparing the number of Windows users that do everything they can to make XP look as much like a Mac as possible, while the number of Mac users working to make OS X look like Windows is very very small indeed Wink
Yes, that does tell us something. I wouldn't ever want to make my OS X look like Windows, be it XP or Vista. But I really love the FlyakiteOSX transformation pack.
Quote:
Another good thing about Mac icons also seems to be that 3rd party programs for OS X also always have beautiful icons that look good at any size, while a lot of Windows programs are still produced with really horrible Win95 icons, both as their shortcut icon and in the dialogs inside the application, which look absolutely awful if you use the Tiles view in XP. Somehow a program just couldn't get away with low-res icons on OS X, but no-one seems to care about bad icons for Windows programs. It really annoys me as some of them are so ugly!
You're taking the words out of my mouth. Every Mac OS X program, even the smallest freeware, has a (more or less) bearable and beautiful icon. But some Windows programs' icons look like they were written in 1995. Even in Vista, some (system) icons will be destroyed to pixel monsters if you increase your display's DPI.
Even in Vista, some (system) icons will be destroyed to pixel monsters if you increase your display's DPI.
A lot of the icons in the Windows and System32 folders are still the 95 versions, even on Vista, and so look pretty terrible even in Small Icons mode, let alone the equivalent of Tiles on XP.
I even found the old Progman icon from Windows 3.1 in there - it's the icon for the grpconv.exe program, which is for converting Progman program groups to Start Menu Programs entries - it was presumably used when you upgraded from 3.1 to an Explorer-based version of Windows as it would carry over your old Progman shortcuts, and I've also noticed it run during a clean install of 9x versions (for some reason the Programs menu seemed to be built as Progman groups first and then converted) - quite why that program ships with Vista I don't know! Quite a few of the old 3.1 programs that come with XP have gone in Vista though eg progman.exe itself, WinChat, Packager all seem to have gone.
I even found the old Progman icon from Windows 3.1 in there - it's the icon for the grpconv.exe program, which is for converting Progman program groups to Start Menu Programs entries - it was presumably used when you upgraded from 3.1 to an Explorer-based version of Windows as it would carry over your old Progman shortcuts, and I've also noticed it run during a clean install of 9x versions (for some reason the Programs menu seemed to be built as Progman groups first and then converted) - quite why that program ships with Vista I don't know! Quite a few of the old 3.1 programs that come with XP have gone in Vista though eg progman.exe itself, WinChat, Packager all seem to have gone.
This made me think of an interesting idea: Running the Windows 3.x (or maybe better the one of a newer version of Windows) Program Manager and File Manager on Vista I'll probably take the one shipped with NT4 SP6a...
@idontknow
Out of interest: What system were/are you running Vista on?
Intel Centrino 1.4Ghz
27GB Hard Drive
768mb RAM
and...
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32mb Vram
The drivers for that graphic card causes a blue screen when running DirectX. For some really weird reason it was able to run a performance rating once, even though it always caused a blue screen.
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