Windows Vista: slow, slow, slow

I'm just typing my first ever blog entry on a computer running Windows Vista, on my uncle's new Dell. And really, it's the most appallingly slow piece of software I've ever used. (I'm using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox, if that matters.)

Everything which appears, or changes, on the screen takes ages except (when you've been doing it for a while) typing text. For example, when you move your mouse over something which has a tooltip, a "ghost tooltip" will appear and won't go away for ages if you move your mouse away. And this is not an old Pentium 3 – it's a brand new Athlon 64, albeit with only 512Mb of memory, with a NVidia graphics card. How on earth did Microsoft conclude that this was fit to release? Perhaps they bargained that they needed something which would be "current" if they took another six years to put the next version out, but even so – this is dire.

And the design is not even that great, anyway. It's not that dissimilar to what I've been using on KDE (on Linux) for ages. Even the window head design was copied by Kubuntu before they could get it into Vista, so it ends up looking like a knock-off of Kubuntu, which is free. But even though Kubuntu does not have the most responsive desktop in the Linux world (which is why I stopped using it), it still beats the pants off Vista.

Terrible. They deserve to go bust.