Now, most of the time – when I purchase a game or a movie, I like to have the disc it came on too.  However, not to be totally closed minded to the game download services out there, I thought it might be fun to try downloading a game from the EA Store website.  Overall, the experience wasn’t too bad.

Now, I know anything EA related – especially with the game I selected to download will get a lot of heat, but I want to take the fairest take on things.  So I headed to the EA Store website, and decided to purchase Spore.  I added it to my cart, paid for it- and the downloading began.

First, I had to download the EA Download Manager.  It is a pretty lightweight download manager (written in Adobe Air) that got the job done.  I simply logged in and started the download. Ran into no problems at all.

Now, the time it took to download was the hard part.  Since the game is several gigabytes in size, it took several hours to download the entire game.  Once it did download, I was able to install it and play it, without any issues.

One question I had is, “What if I need to download the game again?”.  What if my computer spontaneously combusts – and I have to do this song and dance again to get the game?  Well, EA Store’s website says you can digitally download the game again for up to a year.  However, after e-mailing their support team, I learned that you can download it again even after a year – you just simply have to e-mail them and ask.

So, yes – I would still rather have the disc when it comes to getting movies or games.  I can not say I wouldn’t use the EA Store digital download service again though.  It was pretty painless, and as long as I can re-download the game if needed – I see no other really huge problems.

As you might of (or might not have, depending on how often you visit) noticed, I had DISQUS powering the comments on Mitchelaneous, the Web Hosting Show and Firefox Facts.  However, “had” is the important word.  This morning I removed DISQUS across the board.

Now I’ll cut to the chase, and tell you why.  It seems that no matter how I tweaked around with WordPress, I could never get DISQUS to pick up on all my trackbacks and comments.  One or two a day would get stuck going to the internal WordPress comment engine (which is practically blocked from you after you install DISQUS).

Having grown tired of checking two places for spam and comments, I decided things were simpler before DISQUS was brought into the picture.  It might be an alright comment system for some, but for me – it was just a little more trouble than it was worth.  Just my two cents here, so if you have an opinion that is either positive or negative about DISQUS post it in the comments.

Update: I have recently had a change of heart, and have decided Disqus is doing a much better job now, than ever before.  Before you make up your mind, be sure to check out my re-review and troubleshooting tips of Disqus.

The start menu is kinda like shoving everything in a junk drawer and leaving the most important stuff on top. I don’t say that as a bad thing, personally I like my junk drawers. I’ve used search on Vista in the past week more than I probably ever used it in Windows XP ever.

The Favorite Links in the folder view is probably my next favorite feature. I like keeping more than a few folders handy at all times and this does beat the left side menus that the previous version of the OS had.

While we are in my profile folder, the saved searches is nice too. As I said before, this is the first OS I’ve actually bothered to use search with all that much and I like it.

I thought that not having the menu bar would bug the heck out of me – but I can say that I was wrong. I don’t really miss it at all as far as the folder view and some of the default Vista applications go.

Haven’t had much time to play with it, but from what I’ve seen Windows Media Center is pretty cool too. Hard to believe that it is a Microsoft product from the look, feel, design and usability of it all.

I like Windows Photo Gallery. If I had to choose between it and Picasa (Google’s Photo App) I would probably choose it just because it is already here on the PC.

All in all, I might not upgrade to Vista just for the sake of upgrading to Vista – but I can’t say I am totally disappointed in the product either. The thing that will make Vista better is not the miles and miles of folks ready to bash it at a drop of a hat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly a Microsoft fanboy.

I’d like to see people stop whinnying and get to work when it comes to making the Vista view look a little brighter.

…now go check out the negatives I’ve encountered with Vista!