Wow you people actually use impulse, I don't even bother, I only use impule to update the games not to run them lol, All start menu ftw

Why anyone would be using Vista is a separate mystery.

But even if you look at the OS as a program, the question just becomes why you would start a program to start a program to start a program for you. Impulse is an unnecessary additional step, no matter the configuration in question. Why start a game from Impulse when you could just start it direct from Windows without needing to run Impulse? Heck, the whole advantage of Impulse is that, unlike Steam, it doesn't have to be running all the damn time when you want to play a game.

WTH is wrong with Vista? I've been using for a couple years, and its been fine. With the free mycolors "thinkgreen" desktop, the free object dock, and fences, Vista looks pretty much like the Mac OS anyway. You can even download the free soundpackager and load Mac sounds if you want. But I have digressed. I think the truly important point here is... holy crap!!! Look how many games aLap has!

I have one game. Sins of a Solar Empire:entrenchment. And I just uninstalled it because I'm a fool and keep wasting my time playing it. (It's really fun....)

I was thinking about buying demi-god for the summer, but then I realized it wouldn't run on my laptop. Lame. But I hope Elemental will. I like turn-based games more anyway. I can multi-task while playing them, like i'm doing now with this forum.

@Vinraith, because launching a game through steam gives me the steam overlay, which I find love having easy access to.

That said, I've still not bought any games on impulse, I'm currently considering demigod when it comes out. But the ability to split up the games between multiple tabs certainly would make me consider using it.

In impulse? You can make new tabs. Hit that  + button near the tabs

You seem to be under the impression that I want my OS to look like some horrible Apple product, but I'm unclear where you could possibly have gotten that impression. I run XP, I continue to run XP because there's simply no reason to "upgrade" to Vista, which introduces a bunch of new problems and no new benefits of any note to me.

I tend to be on the trailing edge of OS development. As long as the platform I have serves my needs (in this case, as long as Windows is able to run games, since I use Linux for all the real work) why would I go to the trouble and expense of changing it?

Re: Vista
Granted, Vista wasn't as bad at launch as XP was at launch.

However:
-When XP launched, we had recently been treated to ME, the worst piece of shit MS has ever come up with.
-Prior to that, 2K worked badly enough that scores of people were still on 98.  (This doesn't mean 2k was a bad OS, per se-just that it was a workstation OS, although I personally don't like it and it shows, even though XP was built off of it.)
-The difference in functionality between 98 and XP was miles.
-When Vista launched, XP was stable and everyone loved it.
-Vista was in betas/development for quite a bit longer than XP was, with a much larger userbase involved in it.
-The launch looked worse than it was, and the whole 16GB installation thing and the appearance of eating up all your RAM didn't help either.
-The 95 different flavors wasn't a good move.  Okay, so it was only four.  But one of them's useless (though people will still choose it anyway!), and XP only had 2 choices, where the choice didn't really matter.  (XP Media Center Edition was introduced much later, and to my knowledge has only been available in a preinstalled state anyway.  Besides, it's basically Home with more toys.)
-Personal pet peeve: There's still a 32-bit Vista.  A lot of us, as it turns out, were hoping MS would wise up and go full bore with 64-bit.

Conclusion: Vista launch needed to be impressive and was disappointing instead, which is why everyone looks down on it, regardless of how good it may have been and regardless of how good SP1 may have made it.

This has been your offtopic for the day; tune in next time for an Apple rant (or whatever else comes up).

I will be the first Vista lover to come out and say they launched it in a pretty unusable state.  I've been using it since before it launched, and three months after launch it was better than XP.  They needed to extend the beta period, if for nothing else to get peoples launch drivers up to standards...not to mention a few of the performance killing bugs at launch could've been worked out and less bitching would've ensued.

XP was less usable at launch as far as I'm concerned, though.  Of course, not too many people choose to remember that.

As for 32 bit, I don't care for 32 bit either (of my three copies of Vista, not one is 32, though my brother and moms are) but consumers don't care.  They want their apps to work no matter what apps they happen to have, which is one thing 64 bit Vista doesn't provide.

I'm all for Vista, but I can definately see why some people haven't been.  It wasn't without its flaws.

It's not a matter of not remembering it, it's simply unimportant. I didn't switch to XP until 2006, for the same reason I haven't switched to Vista.

You always wait for the first service pack to switch, that's just common sense.

The biggest problem with Vista is it's useless.  For about 99% of the population.

32 bit Vista has little use.  All those performance features require ram.  Sure you can load all your programs into memory and save loads of time, but you still need the ram.  If you have eight gigs of ram, even 64 bit XP just doesn't matter.  It can use it, but it can't actually do anything with it.  That's where 64 bit Vista comes in, using all that wonderful ram to cache your frequently used programs and turn that piece of shit slow poke hard drive into near instant load times.

If you've got two gigs of ram, no flash drives, none of the features that Vista actually takes advantage of to give superior performance, switching from XP is paying a couple hundred bucks for a coaster.  You get to load your browser into ram, your word processor, a few other pointless things that come up almost instantly.  Anything of size that actually benefits from being cached eats too much ram.

Assuming that the preloading of apps was the only difference in the OS, that statement would be valid.  But focusing on that and not acknowledging any of the other benefits of the OS is a bit ignorant.

Too bad you can't move over registrations and all that (so you're running on impulse client rather than steam's.  Though steam's really isn't all bad for some games)

I'd agree. When I switch to XP, I miss a lot of Vista's other features. Things like:

• The search box
• The automatic networking troubleshooter
• The stability and performance tools
• Seeing the contents of the windows when alt+tabbing (there is an XP utility for this, but it doesn't work with WB )
  
• DirectX 10
• Aero (although WB takes care of that )
• The unified games folder
• The shorter path names ("users" vs "documents and settings")

There's no one big feature that really stands out,, but there are a lot of little things that improve the experience and make it more enjoyable than XP.

I wouldn't really advise people to move to Vista, though, if they're still in XP. Windows 7 just around the corner, and I have to say it looks great. It's definitely something worth saving up for, and I plan on upgrading at least my primary machine to it when it's released.

Unless matched with the specific needs of a workstation and whatever limits the whole system must depend on; it's the proverbial upscaling patterns that is enforced to the world at large.

I wonder if costs will some day stabilize enough to call it even effective for a reasonable period of "computing" productivity.

There has to be a physical barrier where a CPU (128bits, possibly) can't outlast the entire gimmicks it drives... the OS might be in trends or a fashionable prospect to *better* performance, the assumption still is what we're willing to pay to gain it. Until a rational maximum is reached, both in cost and in design.

Those aren't worth a new OS, sorry.