I know, the hard coded font stuff pisses me off to no end.

I need win7 for my music production software, it needs a lot of RAM and WinXP's magnifier isn't full screen, doesn't use acceleration so it's a pretty rubbish magnifier for me personally. I really wish I could do what I do, apart from work, in Linux (gaming, music prod) because then I could use KDE/Gnome which is a lot better with themes, and Compiz's magnifier is really nice.

Oddly enough, Windows 8 has much better theme control, although it's bloody ugly. If you use the 'classic' dark theme, you can still benefit from the full screen magnifier and a lot of the UI elements behave better in terms of using correct user chosen colors.. I'm just not terribly fond of Win8's metro thing and some other stuff irritates me. But I'll give it a bash once the final version is out and see how much I can gain from it, accessibility wise.

If you don't mind me asking, were your eyes that bad from birth? It's very rare I find someone with eyesight as bad/worse than mine, it's quite comforting to know there are others out there, and are also geeks :)

What tools/features are you using for Windows? I'm legally blind, -22 diopters of correction for each eye. What I'm currently using is a modified dark theme so that I can use the built in accelerated magnifier (I can't tolerate bright themes) and I've mapped the magnifier to win+mouse wheel to make it more like compiz. I'm also nearly entirely hotkey driven, I use the mouse very little for every day tasks.

Of course there are so many applications that don't follow the windows colour scheme, even the built in High Contrast classic theme is ignored by so many apps, hardcoded font colours and so on.

What really erks me are web pages. I use Firefox with Stylish (or just vanilla FF and set my custom colours to my taste) but most sites have issues rendering correctly because it overrides a lot of colour/style rules.

I can't really comment on Linux's features as I don't use Linux as a desktop, just for servers. Mostly because it doesn't run my music software or my games and I hate dual booting.

Accessibility is still a joke in Windows and for internet browsing.

Golden Delicious .. GOLDEN DELICIOUS.. a German company? I see the Japanese culture bomb has been dropped good and proper! Maybe the name sounds tougher in German ;)

So it costs a bit less than my Galaxy S2 and is way uglier.. pass. Though I'm sure a lot of hardware & software hackers will have a field day with it.

That pretty much sums up my experience with Excel :)

Heh heh, Sony's gettin' shafted!

It was Hiro!

I love my Logitech MX1100R, it's an office mouse AFAIK, not really a gaming one, works great in gaming and standard use. Comfy, replaceable batteries and the extra 3 buttons are handy in some games. It was a bit pricey but I haven't looked back because it's so comfortable to use for extended periods.

Buying 'bling' mice to me personally, like "high performance gaming ram" is just stupid.

Oh, more for the 'just in case' factor / there might be something on the original install I may need, but yes, I wouldn't push on the bloatware to others and I haven't done so in the past.

Apart from the obvious reasons, one of the things that vendors should take seriously is the initial impression a bloated system has on their reputation. Joe Average is going to get a bitter taste in their mouth when that fancy new laptop is bugged down with crap.

What they should really do is have a Startup menu on first boot that shows a list of special deals & promotions with quick and easy download links for popular free and commercial software and/or have the installation files on the drive that one can delete, but definately not pre-installed.

It doesn't bother geeks, the first thing I do is image the drive (in case I want to re-sell the machine) and slap on a clean image of my OS.

He was just playing Dig Dug ;)

>Now get off of my lawn.

okie dokie dukie :)

Duke Igthorn is NOT going to be happy when he hears about this!

I overclocked mine and it split :(

Hey, thanks for introducing me to tmux!

I read it as boning a mosquito :(