Vista!

I’m afraid to admit it.. but I actually.. LIKE Vista. Service pack 1 fixed amost all of it’s pre-release niggles.

Have it on my new Sahara i440D tablet, and it zips along nicely. Full review in the next week or so…

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11 comments

  • Jay C

    October 15, 2008 at 9:37 pm //

    I’m excited to hear that you will be reviewing this tablet; can’t wait to hear about it. I’d really like to know how you feel this stacks up to using a Wacom as far as drawing and sketching goes. Have you ever used a Cintiq? Do you think this is a better bang for buck experience? How does it feel as far as drawing goes?

  • Sean

    October 16, 2008 at 1:33 pm //

    I had this funky thing happen with Service Pack 1 where it wouldn’t recognize my administrator profiles and locked me out of my files. I had to soft book and backup my setting to pre-SP1 in order to get them back. Boo!

    The new tablet looks shweet, though. Wish I could get me one.

  • cartoonmonkey

    October 16, 2008 at 1:46 pm //

    Really! That’s never happened to me before.
    The tablet is resistive touch screen say, food terminal kiosk, vs capacitive (iphone). So.. the touch experience is not fantastic, although it is very sensitive. (25 points of calibration) – it has a very thin layer of plastic over the screen. Hardly noticeable, and with the press of a key, you have full wacom tablet mode enabled.

    It’s pretty great. Dual core too. 3gb of ram. I could have never afforded it if I didn’t buy a demo unit from Allegiance Technology. New they go for $2500 or so, I got it for around $1200. Very worth it. Already had my little bluetooth keyboard / cookbook stand I use to draw with.

    Wish it had multitouch and the pinch gestures that the iphone had.
    If apple released a tablet with a wacom screen, AND a capacitive touch screen with all the pinchy-zoomy gestures.. they just might take me over to the dark side.

    But for now.. it makes all the apple fanboys and girls in the world say OOOooooOOOooooo

    ha ha
    More later,
    C

  • jon

    October 22, 2008 at 4:35 am //

    Hi Chad, I’ve got an old Motion 1600 centrino, but it’s getting a little slow. I have been lurking in wait to get an apple tablet just to annoy pc users (and because it would be purty), but have nearly given up. WAs looking at the sahara, so will be keen to hear your thoughts.

    Jay c, I use both tablet and cintiq and the cintiq is in every way superior to the tablet for creating artwork. However, the tablet is 100% superior in the portability stakes and gets the job done on the road.

  • cartoonmonkey

    October 23, 2008 at 1:26 am //

    Hey Jon,

    I’m about to do a full of the Sahara this weekend, and it’s a fantastic machine. The dual core is a great upgrade. I have a problem with the retail price of a new sahara, but then again, if you’ve been paying the ‘apple tax’.. you’ll not mind a bit.. :-)

    I also own a Cintiq, and it’s superior to a tabletpc, to me, only in screen size, and the power of the machine you attach it to. Pressure sensitivity? Sure it’s more, but so subtle, only the most experienced of users doing super fine detail photo editing etc would be able to tell the difference, and to me, the levels of pressure sensitivity is more of a marketing gimmick from Wacom, imho.

    Seriously.. I wouldn’t wait around for Apple on this one. I’ve been saying the exact same thing since the invention of the tablet pc, back in 2003! Yep, it’s been that long folks.. and at every single apple announcement, I hear.. “I just know the apple tablet is going to be released!” My advice, and I recommend this to everyone: Just get someone to install one of the freely available copies of OSX from bittorrent, that have been modified to run on ANY hardware, even.. the TabletPC. You might even find a driver called “TabletMagic” that will make the pen work with full pressure sensitivity. Buy a legit copy of OSX to make up the difference. Which leads me to the following.. Warning folks, RANT ahead: (and this isn’t aimed at you Jon, just have to get this off my chest) ..ahem..

    Choice!

    I’ll tell you..
    I’ve used OSX, and it just doesn’t cut the mustard in so many ways, I just can’t begin to explain. From an interface standpoint, I find it maddening. The finder, compared to windows explorer, ..it’s just no contest, sorting and viewing directories of files. I just find it so linear and clear on a pc, and on a mac, it’s chaotic, and not very customizable, out of the box..
    When it comes to Mac vs PC, I’m emphatically PC. Here’s why:
    I get a lot of “I’m amazed, you do artwork, and you use a PC!” .. from people. But really, the whole “Mac is better for art” is a meme (and utterly completely false) bit of information left over from the early days when the Mac could display more colors on the screen than the pc. Say, a thousand versus 256. We’re talking ancient history here folks. Thusly, they were “better for art”.. and for some reason, the meme stuck. Steve Jobby rode it, and it’s sale to the young, hip, artistic crowd to it’s present day.

    I’ll be the first to admit, OSX is easy on the eyes. They got the whole rendering engine right, nice and efficient. Beautiful. However, Vista is no slouch.. more on that later… the reason I’ve always stuck with pc, is the raw, cheap power that an open market affords. I could run windows on whatever hardware, trick it out to my heart’s content. With Mac, the choices are made for you, with the moniker: “It just works.”

    I’ve never been one for the whole “trust us, it just works” mentality. It assumes that the user is, effectively, stupid. We’ve removed all those hard to understand choices for you, because, ultimately, you would just screw things up. And in this “just works” mentality, choice is doled out from the top down. You can only syncronize your itunes library with one computer, for example, not two, as in the past. Annoying, and stupid. Apple assuming you’re a criminal from the beginning, or locking you into some situation where you’d have to purchase the same thing twice. It’s a frightening trend that even extends to our government, in the form of McCain’s desperate public relations pic for VP. Palin! Sure, she has zero experience, but you, the public don’t care about all of that nonsense, do you? She.. she just works! Don’t question it! Don’t think about it. We’ve done that FOR you.. ack!

    The Mac has always lagged behind in terms of software development as well. All, and I mean ALL of the great apps out there, adobe aside, have been released on the PC first. And even with the Adobe suite, the applications are coded on the PC first, then PORTED to the mac, meaning, that they were never coded in mac’s native language.. and in that translation, have tons of extra code in them. Open a large flash movie in Flash on a Mac, and you’ll see what I mean. Flash runs incredibly worse on an eight core mac pro, than it does on a quad core PC. It’s proven, and most animation studios rely on PC’s for their flash workstations for this very reason. For someone like me, that enjoys checking out the latest multimedia and graphics software, it means having a PC. Interesting innovation has just always happened on the fast, cheap, and out of control PC side of things.

    Another problem I had with apple, was that whole period before the switch to Intel chips, where they were just telling outright LIES to people about the power and speed of the powerpc chip vs intel, facts that were in fact having apple commercials banned for false advertising in Britan.

    In addition to those condescending “I’m a Mac” ads that Apple puts out.. just really rub me the wrong way.

    I do recommend the Mac to people who don’t do heavy professional work on computers, or have no desire to deeply learn about the system they’re using, say .. most of my family. (sorry family!) Web surfers, web designers..
    Through it all, I’m actually not anti-apple, per se, I just wish they’d get their act together. Release a copy of osx that will run on any hardware whatsoever. Don’t lock people into a single machine on Itunes. Don’t limit features, and dole out upgrades here and there for ten bucks on the iphone. Charging a dollar for a ringtone you could easily make yourself? I question these tactics. I bought the iphone, twice.. and took it back twice, for the above reasons. ..I was very charmed by the work on the interface, and that great buttery smooth mobile os.. but in the end, went for the open freedom of the Google G1.

    Microsoft has it’s problems as well, and I’ll tell you, the instant that PC applications run seamlessly as well as they do in Linux / Ubuntu, I’ll gladly move on over to that open os. But then again.. I’ll probably have to keep a windows partition around for some Team Fortress.. :-)

    ::END RANT::

  • cartoonmonkey

    October 23, 2008 at 1:34 am //

    As an aside, I would say, that after service pack 1, I am really digging Vista! It feels and is, much more secure, and the interface looks fantastic. I never thought in a million years, that I would say it.. but I.. I sort of LIKE VISTA. agh!

  • jon

    October 23, 2008 at 2:53 am //

    Yeah, but macs are PURTY.

    Also, final cut pro is pretty handy.

    And my power supply crapped out on me (probably my fault, I opened the box and it was full of dust) and apple sent a guy to my house to fix it the next day.

    You can do heavy professional work on a mac though. I do. Not to say you can’t do the same on a pc, and dammit, flash does run better on a pc.

    My experience with a cintiq is in using it with a much faster processor than my tablet, so that no doubt colours my thinking, but it’s mainly the extra screen real estate that makes it superior.

  • cartoonmonkey

    October 23, 2008 at 10:23 am //

    Ok, I’ll give you final cut… (But really, Sony Vegas Video is just as easy to use.) And the beauty of the mac.. I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

    Thanks for listening to my late night rant. That’s what a nice bottle of wine will do to you at 1am. . ha! Seriously though, I’ve seen OSX installed on a tablet pc, (google IATKOS DVD), the pen working with the tabletmagic driver too. Dual boot. Best of both worlds! Ok, I’ll get working on that sahara review..

    More soon!
    C

  • Jay C

    October 27, 2008 at 5:26 am //

    http://www.goodiebag.tv/episodes/12_macs_vs_pcs.htm – it will all make sense after you’ve seen the Mac versus PC musical.

    I feel you on the rant, Chad. It’s all hype… I am looking forward to the day where OS’s really don’t matter. Cause really… it’s an OS, right?

    thanks for the info on the Cintiq versus Tablet, everyone … I think I have a hard time justifying the money for a peripheral versus a sketch machine I can take anywhere. I’ve been carefully deliberating this issue for some time – I’ve yet to decide.

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