Vista Thoughts
Posted on December 18, 2007
9 Comments
Anne Z has a post titled, “Open Thread: What Do You Think of Vista?” over at Web Worker Daily. Instead of giving her thread a comment, I’ll give it a pingback instead. 
I’ll start by admitting that I don’t have tons of Vista experience. I dabbled with it for a bit this past summer, but gave up and went back to XP when I couldn’t nail down all the necessary drivers for the (admittedly older) laptop I was using.
Then I received a new work laptop in early November and it came with Vista Business. Since it is a much more modern machine, I decided to stick with it and see how things go. After all, I might be converting the office over to it someday (well, the machines that’ll run it) so I might as well get used to how things work in Vista land.
Now granted, this laptop has 2 GB of ram, a 2.00 GHz Core 2 duo, 7200 RPM hard drive and a Geforce 7900 GT video card, so software has to try really hard to make it feel slow. In fact, I have no performance complaints whatsoever. It always just works.
In contrast to one of the commenters on the open thread, I absolutely love the Vista start menu. Not that I ever actually browse through it! Why the heck should I? I just hit the “windows” key and start typing the first few letters for what I want. Vista finds it (or presents a list) I hit enter and my program is running. This is my only machine that doesn’t have Launchy installed. For my purposes, Launchy just isn’t needed.
I like the aero stuff. I like the way it looks. I like the gloss and the shine. I admit I’m a squirrel. I love using winkey-tab to cycle through open apps. It just looks cool. Does this offer dramatic productivity improvements over XP? Nah, not at all. But what’s wrong with enjoying what you look at for a dozen plus hours each day?
Stability? I’ve yet to see a blue screen, nor can I recall any programs (besides the ones I was debugging!) blow up or crash. I probably take it overly much for granted, but so far it just works.
Annoyances? Oh sure, I have a couple. For instance, when I jump from one VPN connection to another it sometimes decides to cache one of those VPN passwords as my domain password. I usually discover this 15 seconds later as I try to remote desktop to a server or browse a share[1].
When I’m not connected to the office network (and AD domain), the initial login takes a minute or two which seems excessive. Once logged in, all is fine though. I thought the RC of Service Pack 1 might fix it, but alas… it is still an issue.
That same service pack seems to have dramatically improved copying files over the LAN though. That’s no longer a hair-pulling annoyance!
To wrap this meandering thing up, I’ll just brazenly come out and say it: I like Vista. (don’t confuse that with me saying I don’t like any other OS. That interpretation would be silly and illogical).
[1] the fix for the password caching thing: Go to Control Panel. Click User Accounts. Click User Accounts again. In the sidebar, click “Manage your network passwords” and delete the dial-up networking one.
Tags: launchy, microsoft, os, vista, Windows
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9 Responses to “Vista Thoughts”
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Thanks for the trackback… and the detailed response to the question!
It seems that many people using Vista are reasonably satisfied with it. Some commenters pointed out that it’s only a disappointment relative to how long we had to wait for it.
Great to hear real experiences about it.
On the whole, I agree with you. There is nothing inherently bad about it, but where is the promised WOW. One place I have seen the Wow is on any machine without dedicated graphics cards, dual core processor, or 2 gigs of RAM. Anything l have tried it on with less than that is less than enjoyable to use(I am ashamed that I sold a customer some new laptops with Vista, 1 gig of RAM and integrated graphics. It is that Bad).
I am looking for the 5 years worth of development that translated into some must have features. Okay so they bundled launchy, google desktop search, IE7 and some eye candy. That’s all you got for me in FIVE YEARS? and it can’t run on anything other than Upgraded New Hardware?
The only true complaint I have other than the performance issues is with the networking. I too have had some quirky issues and it feels like a half baked TCP/IP stack.
I am glad you are enjoying it and I look forward to hearing about your further adventures with ME 2.0. :OP
Hi Anne - thanks for dropping by! Honestly, I think the Vista bashing is what has replaced the knee-jerk MS bashing ala slashdot of days gone by. I’m not a MS fanboi by any means, but I do get tired of folks bashing it who haven’t even tried it (not that all your post’s responders fall into that category)
side note - greets to another Denver area blogger! (I peeked at your about page
Nathan - good thoughts there, thanks. Your ME 2.0 comment made me laugh out loud.
I just bought a new computer and it was impossible to buy one that was XP. It was Vista or nothing. Am testing it out and so far, it seems fine but being fair, the computer skills i have, make it hard to judge.
And I would mostly agree with you. The only problem is I have to get back to XP at work which is a bigger pain after you have used Vista.
Wish you Happy Holidays and A Wonderous New Year 2008!
Shantanu - I hear ya. In general it isn’t too tough to bounce back and forth between Vista and XP, but it can be a pain at times. Especially since I use launchy (alt-enter) on XP and Vista’s start bar (windows key) on Vista. I seem to always hit the wrong one first when I’m trying to launch an app!
If I was smart, I’d probably look at remapping Launchy…
I will stick with Windows XP for the time being. I don’t want to upgrade my hardware just to use Vista. it uses a lot of memory. I would rather use windows xp, a lot better if you have low memory. vista require a minimum of 1 GB.