Yeah, it’s been a while. I just haven’t been that inspired to write anything. Hopefully I can get back into routine of posting here.

Tonight’s topic: Vista. I finally have an Aero-capable machine in my new T60 2326D7U. The T60 is a great machine, but it shows where Lenovo is going with these….and the trends are disturbing. More on that later.

I installed Vista RC1 build 5600 today on a second HD in the Ultrabay expansion port. I like it overall, it is way more attractive than XP. I had not played around with any install of Vista until today.

It seems to work well, and it auto-installed all of my devices except the CDMA modem.

As I have read, it seems to mimic many of the visual enhancements built into Mac OS X over the years, like transparency and anti-aliased type. There are also things like the Windows Sidebar and its Gadgets (OS X has Widgets, though they aren’t anchored to anything the way the Sidebar is.

IE7 is much nicer than IE6, but it still leaves something to be desired for someone who has been using Firefox 2.0 RC3. The spell check function in FF2 is just too awesome to not be included in all browsers.

There is definately a lot of new, flashy eye-candy, and booting back into XP makes for visual disappointment. It’s interesting, and it will be fun to watch the improvements as MS rushes it to market.