I tried it again. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my laptop. I am not impressed.

I tried out Vista for about a week last year when it was first released. I liked the Windows Aero theme quite nicely, and the new desktop wallpapers of beautiful nature landscapes were a welcoming step up from XP’s tired set of backgrounds. However, there seems to be no real advantage over XP.

The core functions of the OS appear to be almost identical to XP. Microsoft has added a lot of new stuff “on top” of the OS, like a completely useless sidebar on the right-hand side. This sidebar features an analog clock, a photo slide-show window that rotates through my photos in the Pictures directory, and an RSS reader that is not big enough to display an entire headline. I understand that these widgets are customizable, but for standard widgets, they are a complete waste of time.