Both! I am quite pleased with it so far! I has more user-friendly grouping than FB, no ads currently (and if gmail is any indication, they'll be less intrusive and obnoxious when they do arrive), editing capabilities that FB has not incorporated over the years its been out.... and all of that combined with the good parts of facebook. Also, rather than stalking your friends for friend-suggestions, it gives you the option to look for people outright, add people who've added you, or to cull through people you've emailed (if you're on gmail, anyway, I'm not sure what the integration is like for other email services). Photos upload quickly and easily, and you can confirm or deny tags in others' photos (meaning that if someone tags you, it comes up in your notifications with a check and an x under the picture so you can easily tell Google+ to untag you).
Sparks seem to be neat in that they aren't just facebook pages for things you like; it actually looks like it trawls Google for new postings about your interests and tracks them for you, with an option to share to your feed if you so choose. Unlike FB, Sparks are separate from your stream for your friends, and thus your friends won't be flooded out by crap that interests you, nor vice versa. Likewise, your interests won't flood each other out because you flip between them individually.
There are some things that still need improvement, for instance, the notification system choices right now seem to be either "super spammy" or "silent." This is one thing that facebook does have right, in my opinion, where it emails you once about an update to a thread, and then it's quiet until you check back on that thread. There's a conversation on a picture I uploaded yesterday that found about 10 emails waiting over the course of one night's raiding (or something similar, I forget just why I wasn't playing with Google+ at the time).
All in all though, it seems like a cleaner way to keep in touch, and I will be VERY happy if I can get the majority of my friends off the cesspool and over to Google+.
@Goose + Zim - I may have a legal way around shelling out for 7, so I will hold off on the card til I know one way or the other about that, but thank you both for the input. I'll be honest; I didn't do the research I should have when I put XP64 on the machine. I just assumed it couldn't be that different from regular XP (I know, I know
) and went with it because I was under the impression the 64-bit environment was superior (without the knowledge of the issues with this PARTICULAR 64-bit environment).
Now for the silly question... is the amperage right there on the power supply itself, or do I have to go dig out the paperwork that came with it when I bought it? There are kind of a lot of numbers on there
