Clouds

During my morning hunt for something hopefully interesting to post on here, there was one headline I saw which practically cried out for a reply, because it said 'Windows 8 surpasses Vista in popularity'. My reaction was: "Hell, an Indian with a bonfire and a blanket, sending smoke signals from a nearby hilltop easily beats Vista in popularity everywhere but in Redmond, Washington, the home of Mighty Microsoft, creators of that abortion!"

But I shouldn't be too harshly critical, because the new computer I bought when Vista first came out proved to be ideal for testing the first public beta of Windows 7, with which I promptly replaced 'Vasta Vista' on it, against the advice of cooler heads at Microsoft. They said not to install a test beta on your main computer, because it could crash and leave you stuck. Talk about confidence in your latest product, huh? Well, they were wrong. It just happened that Windows 7 was practically bulletproof from day one, and I never went back to Vista.

As we know now, Vista wasn't all bad, just over-protected with security features verging on paranoia, and once those were suitably subdued and it was given a few tweaks, Voila! - Windows 7! I think, retrospectively, Vista's main problem was of the old 'too many cooks' variety. Microsoft could really benefit from doing more listening to its users I'd say. We might not know code from Shinola, but we definitely know what we like and what we want. And the first requirement is that it works, hopefully without a lot of third-party add-ons, tweaks, prayers, or colorful cusswords. And right out of the box - not six months down the road and three dozen patches later. Did someone say '...like Windows 8.1'?

I'm still using Windows 8, and if you want to restore the start button and a choice of start menus chosen from XP, Vista, and Windows 7 you can download a freebie program called Classic Shell which puts back the familiar Start button and its pop-up menu features. And if you want to restore the Windows 7 Sidebar and an even-greater collection of desktop gadgets, get 8gadgetpack for it. With those, your Windows 8 will have features not even found in Windows 8.1 and you probably won't miss the other tweaks contained in the 8.1 version.