I notice in OS X, everything is real smooth. There is little or no motion blur (can read text clearly) when you drag objects around. And scrolling with the mouse wheel in browsers is all smooth n stuff. In windows it jerks rather than float.

Is there any way to get windows to feel all clean the way OS X does? Like some kind of 3rd party desktop rendering engine? or shell? I have no idea what's responsible for this.

Depends. There is no alternative desktop rendering or "shell" that can improve this.

The reason why Vista's desktop management is sluggish is because of the way Microsoft implemented it. Also, Drivers and the hardware you use are a critical factor as well. If you want a smoother experience, go with Windows 7.

Microsoft really improved things in Windows 7 by cutting some fat from the bloat.

Erm...no version of Windows should lag on you.

Make sure your drivers are up to date.

As far as "motion blur" don't use cheap LCD's. Use LCD's with low refresh times (under 5 ms).

re-read what you typed -- are you sure thats what you meant ?

every version of Windows SHOULD lag ?

It was fixed before you even posted.

DoH!

Like waruikoohii said, the "motion blur" (or ghosting) is the result of a poor refresh rate on your monitor. Nothing to do with your operating system. And to be honest, your whole clear readability complaint makes me facepalm, because Mac OS' font smoothing sucks compared to Windows' ClearType. Apple needs to stop pretending that a screen is paper and tune their retarded sub-pixel font rendering to the pixel grid.

If his video drivers arent installed correctly - or has some lame ass computer specs - it too could cause these issues. When you are using the generic VGA driver - it is horrible.

Also, if his computer is crap possibly it cant re-render the image fast enough - or like others mentioned - the LCD sucks.

Knowing the OP's system specs would help a great deal.

OS-X does have a rather simplistic rendering - Vista or even better Win7 should be used to really decide what the problematic variable is -- if any.

no no the LCD is fine, and drivers are up to par. when i use that er OS X (10.4 for intel) well ya know what i mean by that, it appears just fine. no blur, all smooth, perfecto. maybe you're right about the simplistic rendering. was just wonderin if there was something like a gdi++ type thing (made the fonts all smooth that i found in someone's thread below in this forum) but for the desktop itself instead of only the fonts

What are your specs? Vista is silky on my machine.

Your LCD apparently isn't fine if it's ghosting

As far as ClearType (for font smoothing)...why don't you tune it? I don't remember if Vista has a built in utility (I'm on 7, which does), but tuning ClearType will make it look better (usually...I find the defaults to actually work fine in most cases).

Oh, and make sure you're at your LCD's native resolution.

As far as Vista not operating smoothly, and 10.4 operating smoothly on the same hardware...if this is true, then your Vista drvers aren't up to par.

I wish they would fix some of those rough spots such as the fast-user switching feature which blanks the display when switching users, and it is more retarded more than ever now with locking on Vista/2008 and 7/2008R2 making it just lock and then having to click switch user which then blanks it out. Very confusing process, on Mac OS X, I always loved how it did a cube effect with your desktop switching to the other user's desktop or to the login screen, it was so much smoother IMO. Never made sense to me why they never attempted to fix this, but confuse it even more with locking and switching users...

^ Blanks out? you mean the screen goes black while it does that? you need to check your video card out unless i'm missing something here

ill admit for some reason apple computers look more polished than windows based pc's. as to why, i have no clue?

There is no problem with the way Aero is implemented, on any computer with a compatible graphics chip and 1GB of ram or more it works pretty smoothly. People often try to run it on inadequate hardware and then wonder why it doesn't work flawlessly.

Also bear in mind that OSX Tiger is slightly old and won't stress your hardware as much as Visdta