Windows 7 RC Update

Windows Aero
Here's a few screenshots of what I was talking about with Vista/7 Aero:

This, my friend, is the Gadget Gallery, where you add Apple Dashboard-esque "gadgets" to your desktop. But what the fuck was Microsoft thinking with this one? What the hell is with the glowing text?! Seriously. Look at this window. Look at it. It's shit. It's worthless. It's making me angry just looking at it. Now if you'll excuse me, I must go punch a baby.

Another shot of the Gadget Gallery, with a background that's a little more "realistic." But see, in my experience, most people don't have realistic backgrounds. They have pictures of themselves with 82 other drunken frat/sorority kids turning each other upside down to get the treat. Aero should look decent against any background, as Mac OS X's Aqua does. And even with this different wallpaper, it still manages to downright anger me. Glowing link text? Seriously. Fire that designer, now.

Sloppiness
Microsoft still hasn't put the touches on applications sitting around the filesystem that have been around for literally over a decade. Apps like Notepad, Regedit, Write (WordPad), etc. still have the 8-bit icons they were born with, which effing games have updated, 512x512 pixel 8-bit masked goodness. Oh, and the filesystem, while having been cleaned up a touch, still has shit like this going on:

Program Files, sure... integral part of any OS. Makes sense. Users, of course. Critical info in there, and shouldn't be buried. Windows: obviously. That's the meat n' potatoes. PerfLogs? What the fuck is that? I mean, I know what it is, but why the hades is it sitting with the very few, directly OS-related main components? After all of the crap they have cleaned up from the filesystem root, they leave Performance Logs? That's like cleaning up a massive oil spill in the arctic, and leaving 167,000 empty boxes of Tide on the shore when you leave. C'mon!

As for the MacBook Pro installation last night, it had a few hitches, but all ended well. Initially, after installing the Vista64-compatible drivers that came with the MacBook Pro, Aero wouldn't work, and would only do Aero Basic (which is incredibly ugly, even moreso than what's shown above... even in light of it not having transparency support, save menu shadows). Miraculously, running the performance rating tool in System Properties "activated" Aero's full effects. Whatever. Also, Kaspersky's Windows 7-compatible AV application, which installed just fine on the Mac mini, actually brought Windows 7 to its knees immediately after install while self-updating, and I had to force-power off the MBP. Nothing should be able to do this, save a crashed driver.

I am enjoying Windows 7 more than Vista on the same hardware, so far, even with the RC's current misgivings (which will probably end up in the release anyhow)... we'll see how the few games I use Windows for fair (Company of Heroes and America's Army, basically).

Man I'm glad I'm a Mac guy.