Tango 0.99.9 Kai released

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:hl6g40$85d$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> I have no idea what you're talking about.
> I have a ThinkPad x41-tablet (almost 4 years old) which came with win XP 
> tablet edition which I hated to reboot since it took 10 minutes or so. I 
> kept putting it in hibernate instead. I wouldn't even consider putting 
> Vista on it cause it won't boot at all with that.
>
> Since I installed a fresh Win7 copy on it it runs much better and boots 
> almost immediately. I also read online similar reports by other owners of 
> the X41-tablet.
>
> you can find the spec online but in short it's a pentium-m with a 1.5gb 
> ram (I added 1gb long time ago to make the XP work better). 32bit, no 
> multi-core.
>

Well, in that case, I admit I'm very surprised and quite impressed (Not 
totally unprecedented, though, I was quite surprised and impressed with XP 
back in the day). (Also from what I had been hearing from other people even 
as far back as four year ago, *allegedly* such "low-end" hardware couldn't 
be bought at the stores. Guess that was a load of hooey after all.)

I've heard that for Win7, MS put a lot of effort into 
customizability/configurability. Do you have any idea if it can be adjusted 
to the look & feel of XP (with Luna turned off, obviously)? For example, 
open/save dialogs without all the space-wasting junk they added in Vista, 
have "All Programs" as popups instead of being in-set, maybe a Win Explorer 
location bar that stays as a normal text entry field, and the old taskbar in 
case I end up not liking new one. I'm very set in my ways ;) If so, then I 
might actually switch after all. (Otherwise I'll wait for my sister's new 
laptop to arrive and play around with that, and see what I think.)

> I don't like MS software in general (they do make wicked hardware though - 
> best keyboards and mice)

They do have great keyboards and mice (although I find their trackballs 
uncomfortable, I like my Logitech trackball much better), but I've had 
terrible experience with every other piece of MS hardware I've dealt with. 
The D-Pads on their game controllers have been garbage as far back as the 
old SideWinders (I think that was the name of them). My XBox 1 developed a 
broken trace on the motherboard that I had to fix, and some motor has been 
making far more noise than it should for the last few years, and a few units 
were known to catch fire because the power port was connected to the MB by 
nothing more than notably crappy solder joint. The 360's are notorious for 
being the #1 least reliable console in video game history (noticeable by 
anyone who isn't deluded by fanboyism). At one point the 360 failure rate 
was literally about 1 in 3, and most replacement systems were DOA ("360" may 
as well have referred to the support cycle). I had a Zune 1 (greatest UI on 
a portable music player by far, IMO, but only on the first-generation Zune, 
and obviously, connecting it to a computer is all kinds of hell, that's why 
I now use Rockbox on a Toshiba Gigabeat even though Rockbox is kinda screwy 
and ugly and the directional "buttons" are crap.) but as soon as I tried to 
use the TV-out, the IC that drives the analog-out port fried killing both 
the TV-out and right audio channel, and MS wouldn't do a thing about it.

Although to be perfectly fair, Apple seems to be no better with hardware 
reliability. My brother, sister and I have all had one Mac each, and my 
uncle has been using them exclusively since the beginning of time. Well, my 
brother's, sister's and my Macs have all had hardware problems. Mine, for 
example, had the IDE controller go bad and take the HDD with it - only HDD 
I've ever had go bad on me (knock on wood...)...and it still went downhill 
even from there: now it won't even power up, let alone initiate the start of 
the boot sequence (All those boot-time keyboard combos are useless because 
it never actually gets that far. And keep in mind, this Mac is the *newest* 
computer I own.)  And every time I talk to my uncle he's having a big battle 
with Apple about some major hardware component going bad and them not being 
able to get their act together about it (And yet he still swears by them, go 
figure). And my brother's first iPod died after two days.

> but this time they managed to do a decent job. Of course Ubuntu will run 5 
> times faster on similar hardware with only 256mb ram. Unfortunately that's 
> not really the best option for a tablet PC.

Unless I end up going to Win7 and being happier with it than I always 
thought I would be, I could totally imagine myself switching to Ubuntu 
sometime in the next few years...Well...*IF* I could ever find a file 
manager I actually liked (I've tried them all, I don't like any of 
them)...and if they ever stop treating Kubuntu like the proverbial 
red-headded stepchild...and if they ever decide to actually *fix* the 
problem where it defaults to 640x480 (or was it 800x600?) when you boot with 
the monitor turned off instead of constantly passng the buck on that issue 
( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/12301 )...and if the 
KDE and Gnome people ever get their acts together enough to provide users 
with a *common* set of configuration settings.