kaled - 6:08 pm on Apr 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

If you just want to do the basics, who needs "Aero Glass" if it in turn needs a $1500 laptop?

Even the cheapest Dell laptop will run Aero in 1GB of memory adequately (provided you perform a clean install). It will be slower than XP that's hardly news.

The "Vista Interface" is certainly not a step forward. In terms of usability, it is actually a step back. In terms of beauty, it is ok but the way the title-bar/menu-bar/address-bar area has been messed around in Explorer/Internet Explorer is just awful (and I know of no registry hacks to fix it, but they probably exist).

Also, it is much more difficult to differentiate between an active window and an inactive window in Vista. In all previous versions of Windows, the color of the title-bar identified which window was focused but in Vista you have to inspect the width of the drop-shadow - crazy. Also, why does the glass go black when a window is maximized - even more crazy. And why does the close-button have to "glow" - I believe this sole feature bumps up the graphic hardware requirements substantially. And why does it require around 256MB of video memory to operate Aero, that's 32-64 times more than is required by XP.

Incidentally, the glass effects could, theoretically, be achieved in Windows 2000 - it has the core functionality.

Kaled.