Over Comming Vista

It has been over four months since I installed Windows 7. Now what is the cultural significance of four months? That's about how long I played with Vista before giving up.

In the time that Win 7 has been running I've come across many a bug that had to be squashed. From Music Match to Power DVD, Soundblaster and even the Blue Scream of Death. (You should have heard me when my video drivers gave me the bird.) And, going so far as to hack stuff with Linux; I have swatted all but one: MS Paint.

I have a dream job, that is to be a head slapper. I would loom over the shoulder of some programmer and when they do something like remove the ability to draw a two pixel wide line I then would slap the back of said programmer's head.

Now normally the speech boxes I use are two pixels wide. One is barely visible, three looks too fat. Now to do two I have to click the box tool, click to bring up the width menu, click one signal pixel, click and drag, click far away from the box to deactivate the handlers, click and drag again, click far away to deactivate again. In XP Paint I click the line tool, click two pixel width, click the box tool, and click and drag.

7 Paint: seven steps.
XP Paint: four steps.

That is where the term triple-clicking comes from.

Stuff like that had me wishing for Vista Paint and even XP Paint. So I fire up XP Mode to see if I can get XP Paint to work as a virtual app in Win 7. I worked at it for awhile, but then an idea occurred: could I just copy/paste the whole program over? I have a version of MS Works I copied from an old computer I bought ten years ago. It still works! Now will MS Paint do the same? YES! XP Paint works on Win 7. That way I don't have to wait for XP Mode to boot up.

But, and there always is a big but, there is till a fatal flaw: random canvas transparencies. When I highlight an object and place it over another random bits of canvass show up. Even with the transparency turned on. This happens in both versions. There is a way around it, cut or copy/paste.

By the way, Vista Paint does not work in Win 7.

There is a lot of good to say about 7 Paint. Stuff I've been wanting for years. 7 Paint has a section for custom colors that doesn't replace the default colors for the duration of the document. Eleven zoom levels. Text at each level of zoom, not just one. Shape Selection and each one you can live preview line fill and center fill! I just discovered that while writing this out.

I do use 7 Paint a majority of the time. I however use XP Paint for the finishing touches on a comic.

After all this. The bitching, whining, pissing, moaning, waking up with a cold sweat, I will say I am sticking with Windows 7. Now, If yet another hard drive fails and I have to reinstall, and someone is holding a gun to my head and says I can't use Win 7, I would not go to XP, I would choose Vista.