2010 the year of the Tiger Woods
and the year we migrated to a proper 64bit OS
Beesta has become Bentana Cthiete
Its grown from a brat into a sassy pre-teen;
even lost some weight.
It only took an hour to install and archive the
old Vista OS. However, customizing the new OS
to work properly is taking much longer.
Thankfully its just simple design issues this
time and not drivers.
Opera 9.63 is still the only version that lets
you utilize the fantastic voice options on a
64bit system. A shame because Opera 105 is hot.
To keep the application from crashing at random
you must go to opera:config and disable the
mail client. Setting up the older version of
Opera to default to webmail is tricky too.
You have to create an ini file and make
sure the OS and Opera have their default
mailto options set accordingly. Remembering
all these cheesy steps just for Opera Voice
and the ability to click the craigslist
email link into my webmail were the hardest
parts of the install.
The snazzy "Switch between windows" button has
been removed but can be manually pinned back to
your taskbar with this
shorcut line
C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe DwmApi #105
and this icon set
%SystemRoot%\System32\imageres.dll
To prevent you from opening too many app
windows they've removed the minimize window
group option. To see the old menu and minimize
just your 3 window 50 tab Opera session hover
your mouse over the AeroPeek taskbar and hit
shift+ right-click.
I do miss dreamscene though. The cheesy
waterfall videos (I've archived them to use
forever with vlc and KMplayer desktop
playback options) were pure 70s electric
motion glass painting nostalgia regardless
of wasted resources. Though, to be fare the
characters and scenes default desktop
backgrounds of Windows 7 on shuffle are
pretty damn amazing and contemporary.
XPSP3 will supposedly still be supported after
April. So its probably best to leave the dusty
old thinkpad as is. If the ol' T40's still
tickin' come 2014 I might upgrade the laptop
to Bentana Cthiete just for the fun. Hopefully
Opera will have Voice working on x64 by then.
