Plain and simple, you *can* use the standard GUI...

Just go to themes, and choose... "Standard"

How can this be so hard?

Reply

The Vista GUI is horrible. I recently purchased a laptop pre-installed with Vista Home Premium. At first, I was slightly impressed with the fresh clean look of Vista. Then, as I started searching for the customizable options, I realized that I couldn't find anything. In their quest to make it prettier, they removed the functionality that I have come to expect out of a Windows OS. On another topic, the wizards and the help menus make you feel like a total idiot. At least XP treated you like an intelligent adult who has to figure a few things out for himself, but that's ok, because it still allows you to customize a large portion of it. I also figured out how much RAM Vista uses on an average basis. Are you ready for this? I don't think you're ready, but I'll say it anyway. A WHOPPING 300MB OF RAM! That's right, you read correctly, 300MB of RAM just to make the windows transparent and look pretty. It's no wonder they require a 2 GB setup. If you have anything other than a top of the line PC, you'll run super sluggish. When I realized just how much memory the GUI was running, I pulled out my old XP Pro CD and installed. I sincerely hope Microsoft will do something about this. I think if they allow users to run the XP Luna GUI, a lot more people will switch to Vista. They may praise and exalt the "New and Improved Revolutionary" Vista GUI, but plain and simple, it's a resource hog that sucks the life out of your PC. Hate to say it Microsoft, but if you don't change your ways with Windows 7, I'll either stay happy with XP, or find myself shunning Microsoft in favor of Linux.

Reply

Well, actually the Vista gui is rather effiecient since the Beta 2. I got beta 2 and i tried to run it on my gaming machine to see how it is..

a 3800+ 2x amd 64
2 gbs Kingston ddr 2
a x1600 pro Radeon 512 mb
300gb hardrive 7200 rpm sata
Dvd Ram

And with the beta it was super laggy, it was the slowest os ive every seen! Realy, Sometimes even the os would run game installers because of driver issues and etc, It was horrible. But now the gui looks rather pretty, it stands a good chance to regain some momentum for Microsoft.

Reply

Having used Vista I agree there is little gain by the new Aero gimmicks. It is useful to draw attention to specific windows and good to impress those who haven't seen it yet. The 3D tab-bar is too limited to be a great innovation. However under the hood there are some advances which will make Vista the better Windows - at least as soon as hardware drivers start getting available.

For the open source part I just remembered a great project: Looking Glass by Sun. It is a 3D Desktop for Linux. the windows seem to be truly 3D, you can open a video player and actually turn the player's window and watch it from the back. Seems to be more advanced than MacOS and Vista combined.

Reply

Let me start off by saying:
there is nothing new about the vista interface

Vista is basically XP with a new look. And what good does that look do? Not much, exept that it attracts customers who think that a shiny paintjob automatically makes something better. It also makes it slower.

I downloaded rc1 from the MS site just to see what it was like. I was reformatting a partition anyways, so I decided why the hell not. After getting a fake serial to bypass the 30 day limit (which I might as well to have wasted my time doing, I hasten to add), I installed Vista.

It took about 1hr 30min, and after that I had to reinstall GRUB, since this version of Windows still ignores other O/Ses. Yay!

Now, lets get to this "new look" thing. The Aero theme didn't work out the way it should have, and after about an hour of poking around on the web, I found out that the reason it wasn't in the list of themes was that Vista checks out your specs and denies you features that are boasted on the site based on the results. I don't have a fancy comp, no multi-million GFX card, and only 512 MB RAM.

But linux works fine - with compis and XGL, which do pretty much the same thing as this Aero, just without the lags. I usually have them turned off, just cause I like things simple.

I had expected Vista to be slow on my machine. Hell, I was in for a shock. I got the speed I would have expected WITH the Aero theme WITHOUT it. Bloody hell, they really blew that on me. I hope for the sake of all the insane Windows users out there that Vista will work on boxes with less than 4GB RAM, and that 32-bit systems won't be obselete purely because of Vista's non-existant improvements.

People have said that Vista looks like MAC, they have said it resembles Linux. And I have to agree.

I found the theme similar to MAC - all shiny and beveled, with anti-aliased fonts (at last - that actually IS an improvement!). I don't have much experience with MACs, but at a glance it could be a MAC with a retarded colour sceme and no menu.

As for the Linux part of that, a lot seems to have been taken from there, as well. Take the Open and Save dialogues, for example. They work the same way as the ones for Gnome, which is one of the window managers for Linux. And the best one, I think
Both use the same expandable lists of filetypes (that it, when any MS software will allow you to save in a non-proprietry format) and the favourites list works the same way as Gnome's. I think KDE has the same thing, but I'm not sure.

So what good does this Aero thing, which I can't use, do me? None. None at all. XGL and compis, which took me half an hour to set up, have not been developed by a capitalist company (I know Aero wasn't actually made by MS; but that's beside the point) and work just fine. So, if the only thing that's new is the look, and the look works better in other systems, why should I as a normal user use Windows Vista? I'm still waiting for someone to come up with that answer...

In the end, I reformatted Vista into a media partition. It's ext3.

Reply