[Porsche-O-Phile]

I got my wife a netbook with Windoze 7 on it for xmas. My initial impressions are not that positive. I find the user interface to be cumbersome, needlessly complicated and a pig on resources just to accommodate Micro$oft's predictable onslaught of stupid doodads, animations, fadeouts, dancing clowns and christ-knows-what-else that only get in the way of having a simple, efficient interface (like the "windows classic" desktop that's been around since the days of Win95).

As an added annoyance, the version of Win7 that came with this netbook (a Dell) is a dumbed-down, crippled version called "Windows 7 Basic". Among the things that are crippled out of this idiot-ized version is the ability to set your own windows desktop background to whatever you want (you're cheerfully provided with a big giant obnoxious Dell logo instead, which you have no say whatsoever in changing). Well, this pissed me off to no end. I didn't just spend several hundred bucks to have my wife's computer be a farkin' billboard, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be conned into shelling out ANOTHER few hundred bucks (more than the cost of the netbook) to "upgrade" to a full version of Win7 just so I could change the frikkin' desktop.

I finally (after an hour of digging around) managed to find a crack program that allowed me to change the background to a family photo my wife wanted. But I was HUGELY irritated by this whole "typical Micro$oft" crap where their pushy marketing trumps any engineering excellence or technological innovation they come up with. If it were my netbook, I'd have wiped the entire thing clean and installed Linux or XP, but it's not mine and my wife just wanted to get to using it without sitting around for two days while I fiddled with setting it all up.

She agrees with me about the default Win7 interface though - it's horrible and creates a lot of (confusing) duplication of shortcuts, is way too dependent on needless and superfluous animated garbage and ding-dongs, and makes a simple task like point-clicking to open the application you want a 5-step process since there is so much "clickable" junk all over the place that's easy to accidentally select - especially when using the touchpad. A mouse did solve some of the cursor control issues, but what helped the most was turning off all the stupid default crap and reverting to a simple, "windows classic" type desktop interface.

M$ got it right back in 1994/1995 with respect to that interface. Why the need to fart around with it? Leave it alone already.