Vista is a pile of shit. Help me start digging.
 

But no, seriously, I just got a new computer.

I was lazy and had one built for me.

XP was not an option.

Thus I have Vista, until October (as I pre-ordered Windows 7).

I've already managed to shut off the UAC, but I'm wondering if you guys have any other tweaks etc. that will make it more livable. I know there's more than just that.

Do basically everything you did to Vista to make it livable. Turn off all the fancy graphics stuff and for the love of god avoid aero. Its pretty but useless and unless you have scads of extra RAM stashed away somewhere is way to heavy.

Edit: Oh and windows firewall and windows defender. Basically go into the security panel and turn all windows based systems off and go get you some better ones.

Yeah, Windows Defender is good for shit. Turn it off so it doesn't have conflicts with other, better software.

I had XP up until now, or I'd just do all that stuff.

Already done.

Sorry I spaced for a second. Was trying to do homework and watch Bones while typing. It doesn't work well. That should have read:

Do basically everything you did to XP to make it livable.

All I REMEMBER doing to XP was turning off sounds, turning off windows security, and changing the power settings.

Which I have done, plus turning of UAC. Is that the extent of the headaches I will have with Vista? 'cause if so it's not so bad as I had been led to believe by the entire internet.

This is basically the XP optimization guide but written specifically for Vista. With XP and a decent system you could get away without most of this but for Vista you might have to do a little more.

Other than that Vista really isn't that bad of an OS as long as you treat it right and avoid being a douche to your computer.

Fixed that for you. You WILL have to adjust to the new way things are organized and idiotic fights over control over your folders because of triple-state check boxes on all of your important folders refusing to stay unchecked and switching to the new "I'm-not-actually-checked-but-fuck-you-anyway" state whenever you try to make them behave, but short of those incredibly petty squabbles with the system and the fact it's never honest about how much HDD space I have left, I have to admit, it's not the absolute worst it could have been.

I've never encountered a single problem even remotely like that.

IIRC I solved this by enabling the hidden Administrator account and then setting things the way they oughtta be.

I still can't get my folders to consistently appear as thumbnail/details/list or whatever I want a given folder to display as.