Saturday, May 19, 2012

Windows 8 Ejects Aero, Favors Solid Ground


One of Microsoft's litany of blogs has posted a bunch of info about the upcoming Windows 8, and boy howdy does it look good.

I was never a fan of Aero. I'm on a Windows 7 machine right now with the Windows "Classic" theme active. Doing that saves me over 100MB of memory. For most people, that 100MB is an almost academic subject, since most computer nowadays come with 2GB or more of memory, so why worry about one twentieth of RAM?

Really? I guess that there is no reason. But I'm a geek. I'm also a geek who more frequently than not has upwards of twenty tabs open in two browsers at the same time. Memory is important to me.

The other reason why I hated Aero was because I felt that it was flashy for the sake of being flashy. When everyone did a "Top Tech Of The Last Ten Years" list in 2010, many, if not most, of them had Windows XP on the list and talked about how Mac OS X from 2001 felt anachronistic and dated. Windows XP was just... Windows XP. It was perfect. It still looks perfectly fine, today.

Aero will not be that. Aero, by Microsoft's own admission, already looks "dated and cheesy." For the love of Pete, the windows have drop shadows! You don't get worse than that.

So, yes. I think that Microsoft's new UI direction looks great. I don't like Metro, but that's because I don't like tablets. But this new classic interface looks glorious. Truly glorious. I feel like we will finally get our follow-up to my beloved Windows XP... with SP2, that is.

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