A couple months ago, it was pointed out that while Flikr allows screenshots, they're not exactly friendly to those who fill their profiles up with them. Since then, it's been in the back of my mind that my own Flickr account is rather heavy on the machina lately. So today, I plan on padding it.

I'm hardly a photographer. I have a "pro" account on Flikr just so I can upload as many photos as I please without being selective. I'm definitely in the realm of snapshotter. Perhaps I will enlist the assistance of my ex-wife who is the queen of all knowledge photography-wise.

I'd also like to point out, that my shots are top of Flickr's "most interesting" list regarding "IronForge" and I'm on the first page for "World of Warcraft". =)

Edit Update: I've posted the results of my little snapshot rush as a Flickr set entitled "5 Minutes".

I installed the Windows Vista beta on a second partition (used the GPartEd LiveCD to repartition first) to dual-boot it safely with XP. The install was slow, but not insanely so. Vista failed to recognize my soundcard and on-board ethernet, but I installed NT/2000/XP drivers and they seemed to work fine, which makes sense since Vista is still NT at its core.

What Suprised Me:

• The interface was quite snappy in all its cloudy-translucent glory. I was expecting it to be slow or be resource-intensive, but it wasn't nearly as much as I imagined. XP is still faster of course, but it's not a huge difference on my PC.



• I enjoyed the flashy aspects. For instance, I adored the thumbnail previews of apps shrunken to the taskbar, even though it's completely unecessary decoration. I'm sure this is the new-toy feeling which will quickly fade. The gaudy parts will get to me, I usually prefer my desktop more spartan.
• Colours and customization of the UI seem much more flexible and friendly than it did for XP's "blue" look. I could set the translucent stuff to any tinted colour I wished.
• Cleartype appears to be improved, I didn't think that was possible because it was already fantastic on XP. Text display on Windows is by far one of its strongest points and it's clearer, sharper and easier to read than ever before. It makes me cringe is to see the fuzzy text on OS X or the malformed type on Linux desktops in comparison. Cleartype rules.

General Annoyances:

• I officially hate IE 7's approach to security. The "sandbox" protected mode decided that I my own local-file homepage cannot share a window with anything on the Internet, segregating it and rendering it near-useless. This is just a plain-text HTML file that I've made myself with no javascript or any other fancy stuff, yet IE 7 deemed it a security risk. I understand the reasoning, with it being a local file and all, but can they not separate the process without it becoming a user-interface issue? This strikes me as a lazy approach to security.
• "Security" does indeed feel like just a bunch of "are you sure?" prompts worded differently. There are even more of these prompts than I thought possible, I can't seem to do much of anything useful without invoking one. If something goes wrong, it will be undoubtably the user's fault because they accepted one of these zillion mind-numbing prompts. And thus Microsoft washes their hands clean.
• Folder menus are greatly improved and more useful than in XP, but I found that "classic" folders didn't remove the menu panel. Plus I don't want to see thumbnails or media details in my folders, I really don't. I loathe Mac OSes for deciding what I want, so it's a big disappointment for me to see Microsoft go further in this direction.

Bugs and Performance:

• The new "gadgets" sidebar pane is a system resource hog! It was causing Media Player to stutter and brought my system to its knees for reasons I cannot fathom. All for the sake of a little calendar, clock and RSS feeder. I'm dead certain I could find a third-party docking tray that would be infinitely faster.
• Media Player 11 is a disgusting resource hog, but then it's been hopeless since about 9 or so. Winamp FTW!
• When anything crashed, often all all of the related windows (including taskbar on the start menu) would lock up, or the whole system entirely. I've never had an experience like that with any NT-derived OS from Microsoft, things should exit cleanly, even on a beta. This shocked and horrified me, it felt like a throwback to Windows 95.
• Vista pages virtual memory a lot, sometimes for no apparent reason and if I happen to be doing something like installing a game or copying files at the time, it will slow to a crawl. I had one 37 meg folder take almost 3 minutes to copy. Attempting to copy my 4 gig photo collection (modest by many standards) estimated 2 days to complete! I cancelled the file copies and tried again later which worked just fine, but it's a disturbing performance issue. This beta is not ready for primetime yet.

The Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) beta is neither spectacular nor bad. It's not a giant leap as far as the end-user experience goes. They've added Tabbed browsing, very similar to Firefox and Opera, and it's about time. The toolbars function better and the search box is easier replaced by Google (yay!). Rendering seems a little faster, but nothing too impressive, still slower than both Firefox and Opera.

It still makes many mistakes in how it renders websites and while I'm sure there are people that can list a bunch of changes, it seemed to make all the same screwups it did before. This is a clincher for me, it feels like they changed the look and feel, but not the core.

On the security side of things, well apparently the XP version of IE 7 doesn't support the 'sandbox' mode, for that you have to wait for Windows Vista. There are other, more minor fixes, but don't let Microsoft's marketing department fool you, none of them are revolutionary and could have just as well been made as security patches for IE 6.

Final Conclusion: Firefox is still much better and Opera is the real cutting-edge browser that everyone else follows. I can't see myself switching back and IE will still collect dust for me. I wouldn't say rush into the beta unless you're already an IE fan (and if you still are after all this time, I'd doubt your sanity).