I Upgraded to Vista

This weekend, I got an e-mail from the business school telling me that I have access to all this free software just for being a student. Well, one thing I happened to be offered was a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, to which I said, "I'll give it a shot." I downloaded it yesterday, knowing that I would have to upgrade my RAM to run it, which I did today. I went to Best Buy and bought 1GB of RAM, which put me over the minimum Vista requirement by only 256MB (I had 2 256MB cards in there from when I bought it). Off the subject, I want to get a second 1GB card, bringing the total to 2GB sooner or later, but given that the card I bought today was $134, I think I'll wait.

Anyways, after a quick and painless install of the RAM, I was ready to install Vista. It took me about 3 hours to install, and I'm still not done fiddling with it, but this is as far as I'm getting tonight. Click the screenshot to enlarge it and see what it looks like. Now, in hindsight, I think I should have installed Vista on my external hard drive as an axillary OS, because that way, it wouldn't have been as much of a commitment, and right now, I'm having post-purchase remorse. There is a lot about the look that I like, especially coming from clunky XP and not a Mac OS, but there is a lot that I don't like. I'm hoping that most of what I don't like will cease to be an issue when I get used to it (and upgrade my RAM again).

Some things I don't like is the unnecessary bulk that comes with the OS. There's a lot of features that are unnecessary, yet fun or cool, but there are also a lot that are unnecessary and totally pointless, and just suck memory. Also, and this isn't the fault of the OS, but a lot of things are a bitch to use now because the compatibility is all messed up. Some things I can't even use anymore, but they can eventually be replaced.

I'm sure once I get used to it, it'll be fine, I just need to get to that point. Once I get used to it, then I can really tell you why I don't like it. Until then, anybody got any tips on how to turn off my touchpad when I type? Vista took away all of the Fujitsu controllability on this thing, and I keep accidentally hitting it when I type, so I'll start typing in the middle of some other sentence. It's annoying.