“CAL (butt-print) MIT”

I think it’s a sentence…

Good:

1. I get the impression that most reviews became enamored with the new task bar, which, while compelling and does save a lot of time, is not entirely critical to me.
2. If the tablet functions of Vista were its only must-have features, then the alternate input improvements are the key selling points of Windows 7 for me. Here we have much improved Chinese handwriting recognition and speech recognition (in particular, dictation) in multiple languages. These have passed the critical threshold of being useable and indeed I can say they are better than keyboard input. That is no small feat.
3. Math input panel, as mentioned previously, is not quite up to par yet, but I can see a lot of potential. While it is faster than typing straight LaTeX, it is not faster than LyX. But for labeling figures, this is perhaps useful.
4. PowerShell, i.e. Monad, is beautiful.
5. The volume controller has been restored to usefulness, with audio loopback for devices now possible.
6. Libraries could be a very useful feature, but seems to be lacking something that helps ease their management.
7. Per-file versioning (from system restore) should be very helpful.

Bad:

1. Windows Media Player 12 is a piece of crap and a step backwards. It supposedly can stream media to another machine, but this comes at the cost of a fragmented UI, losing the “Now Playing” auto-playlist, and losing the Advanced Tag Editor.
2. The old Sound Recorder is still gone, as it was in Vista. Its replacement is still a piece of crap.
3. Kerberos integrated logon doesn’t work any more. This isn’t a strictly OS issue, I suppose.
4. Lack of serious support for single-touch input. You’d think there would be at least something to help with zooming and scrolling, but no… Alternatively, at least a virtual driver could be written that combined multiple input devices to simulate the effect (touch + pen, or pen + mouse).
5. Windows Media Center: still stagnating at the stage of focusing on over-the-air TV. The internet stream offerings are poor and unimaginative.
6. Not fast(er than Vista) in starting anything, I’m almost certain of that. However, it is very fast in (visually) shutting down programs, which, as an obvious UI illusion, beggars belief for only being implemented now.

Ugly:

1. With the exception of the task bar, most UI elements have gotten uglier.
2. The start menu is butt ugly. Look at the search box and the shutdown button (on the left), as compared to Vista (on the right). I don’t know what these UI designers were thinking.

Speaking of old systems, look at this circa 2000. It starts and shuts down in tens of seconds and uses 42MB of memory when the system is unloaded. 42MB!

It doesn’t work out of the box, though. The way to get it to work is to install the following:

1. The driver, version 1.20.45, from nVidia
2. Forceware Multimedia 3.62 from XFX (with these two, the card will work with nVidia provided applications)
3. April 2006 update for MCE 2005 Rollup 2 (that makes the card work under MCE)

It still craps out occasionally, but it works. Image quality is pretty good.

Edit: Wow, a couple of days playing with MCE made me realize that PC’s these days can be woken from hibernation on schedule programmatically — that’s right, hibernation, not standby, and that’s right, by software, not via wake-on-hardware. I wonder how that happens… I gotta try this on an older PC now to see if it works there, too.