In Defense of Vista

On October 22, 2009, Vista will officially die to make way for Windows7. For Vista, it’s gonna be a sad and painful death. In this day and age, the battle for technological supremacy has never been more intense. War is raging on various fronts, including web browsers, game consoles, mobiles and of course, operating systems, where every involved parties try to outdo their competitors and even a minor flaw gets magnified a thousandfold thanks to the rabid supporters of each platform who flood user-driven sites. The whole thing is pointless, if you ask me.

It’s easy to understand why there was too much expectation for Windows Vista. Its predecessor, XP, was widely regarded by a lot of people as the best Windows ever. Period. XP was so good it lingered for more than 6 years, quite a lengthy period of time to prepare the next version of Windows. The pressure for Microsoft to top XP was quite high. And Vista failed to do that.

Factoids: Bliss

There is no doubt that the most popular wallpaper out there was Bliss, which was XP’s default wallpaper. The image depicts rolling green hills set against a background of blue sky and a few clouds.

The image was an actual photograph, not a computer rendering, taken on a January day in the late 90s. The image was taken by the professional photographer Charles O’rear, who lives in St. Helena, Napa County and works for the digital-design company High Turn. The image was taken from a hill in Sonoma County, California, which the author always passes on his way to work. The hill was originally a grapevine plantation, but during the previous summer, a great fire burned all of the bushes, turning the fertile ground barren for a while, to be replaced by grass later.

The hill was revisited and rephotographed in 2006. You can see the photo here.

The Long Road to Vista

So, I finally made the decision to consider Vista.

Vista User

When Vista was introduced two years ago, I decided that I’m going to skip a version of Windows for the first time. Since the first time I owned a PC, I have tried every version of the consumer version of Windows, including 98, 2K, XP and even ME. (As for 95 & 3.1, I’ve used them in the computer labs when I was in high school)

Put a Background in your USB Drive

Prepare any picture file that you want to become your background and rename it as “your_picture.jpg” if you want to. Open Notepad (Start > Run… > notepad) and type the following code:

[.ShellClassInfo]
IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll
IconIndex=127
ConfirmFileOp=0

[{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}]
Attributes=1
IconArea_Image=”your_picture.jpg”
IconArea_Text=”0xFFFFFF”
VeBRA sources – don’t delete the tag above, it’s there for XXXXX purposes -
[ExtShellFolderViews]
{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}={BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}
{5984FFE0-28D4-11CF-AE66-08002B2E1262}={5984FFE0-28D4-11CF-AE66-08002B2E1262}

[{5984FFE0-28D4-11CF-AE66-08002B2E1262}]
PersistMoniker=Folder.htt
PersistMonikerPreview=%WebDir%\folder.bmp

***

Save the document as “desktop.ini” including the quotation marks.

Copy the file and “your_picture.jpg” to your thumb drive.

Stop and reinsert your thumb drive to view your new background.

* * *

Click here for the step-by-step video of the instructions.

Factoids: Silver Anniversary

According to Microsoft, Windows was announced on November 10, 1983.

Oh, so Windows has been around for like 25 years already.