25 Feb Windows Vista First Impressions
I must say, I am not eager to switch all of my Windows machines over to Vista for several reasons, not the least of which is cost. But for purely academic purposes, I purchased and installed Windows Vista Ultimate edition on my old gaming machine, just to see how it is.
All in all, Vista seems like a pretty robust offering. I haven’t gone into every nook and cranny yet, but I have kicked the tires and poked around a bit. The interface seems solid and the Aero Glass interface is slick. But in the end, it’s just some eye candy on the old interface. The same stuff is there: X for close, minimize and maximize buttons, etc. One annoying thing is that some windows don’t seem to have their titles in the title bar, almost as if the glass effect is so pretty that it would be just wrong to muck it up with text.
Just what is the Aero Glass effect? Well, from what I can tell, it just makes the edges of each window somewhat opaque so that you can sort of see a fuzzy image of what’s beneath it. Big whoop.
However, there are a few notable upgrades, that I understand only appear with the Aero Glass effects turned on. First, there is the Alt-Tab window switcher. It now shows mini representations of each window as you flip by. Hovering your mouse over each window’s item in the task bar pops up a similar representation. And now Windows-Tab will give you the 3-D task swticher. Nothing really new here as there have been XP add-ons that do this for years. One great addition: you can now Alt-Tab to the desktop, which essentially minimizes all open windows to show the desktop.
All in all, my P4-2.54GHz system with an ATI 9700 Pro All-In-Wonder graphics card seems to handle the Aero Glass interface just fine. My system has 1GB of RAM.
I tried a few random, but standard, tasks. I plugged in my camera and offloaded some pictures and videos, and I plugged in my old HP scanner.
When the camera (Sony DSC-M1) was plugged into the USB port and turned on, Vista immediately recognized it and started loading drivers. The camera’s interface is essentially just a standard removable drive, so I didn’t anticipate any issues here, and there weren’t any. Next, the familiar “what do you want to do” dialog popped up and allowed me to import pictures and videos directly from the camera. It allowed me to give the “roll” a name, which I did. This was used to create a subfolder in my Pictures folder where all of the pics were placed. It even recognized and imported all of the videos I had on the camera too (MP4 format) even though Vista could not play them (Feh! Any Mac can play MP4s out of the box, and it’s not like MP4 is a proprietary standard).
Vista then popped up its picture viewing application, which is similar to Picasa or iPhoto in that it shows thumbnails and allows for slideshows and the like. It was relatively intuitive and there were options to burn the photos or share them on the web, neither of which I explored.
My next task was to plug in my old HP flatbed scanner to see how it would work. Vista recognized the scanner immediately and had a little download party to get the driver, but everything worked perfectly. It even allowed me to press the scanner’s interface buttons to begin a scan. Unfortunately, though, it seems like Vista’s functionality in basic scanning is very vanilla, as every button took me to the same interface with nary any difference. But there were many options, including selecting the dpi, getting a preview of the scan, and selecting from a variety of output formats. Once each scan was complete, Vista went into the same routine as in importing pictures from the camera. It allowed me to set comments and metadata and would then import them into subfolders in my Pictures folder and open the picture viewer.
One other thing I noticed about Vista that I really like is the disappearance of the “Documents and Settings” folder. It has been replaced simply with “Users”. Under the Users folder is a folder for each user on the system, which in turn has subfolders. Each user folder acts similar to the “My Documents” folder, so there isn’t a near-invisible (you have to know where to look to find it) folder above “My Documents” anymore. I really like this, as I frequently use Windows-R to open the Run dialog to navigate to places on the hard drive(s). Typing in “c:\Users\…” is a lot easier than getting there via “Documents and Settings.”
Vista also comes with Internet Explorer (IE) version 7. IE7 is playing catchup with many of the usability enhancements found in other browsers such as Firefox. Tabbed browsing is now a Microsoft standard. Overall, IE7 seems solid, but I am still concerned over potential security flaws in the browser as well as scripting being allowed to run by default. One neat feature is a button that shows thumbnails of all the open websites.
As for time wasters, Vista has the usual set of games installed as well as a few new ones. All get an interface overhaul, which seems more a problem than an enhancement at first. For instance, Freecell seems a little clunkier and can now allow cards to be dragged as well as clicked and then clicked into another location. But sometimes I tried to click and got a small drag, which tended to leave the card unselected and so it wouldn’t move when I clicked on the destination. It’s a small nit, yes, but for those of us who love our Freecell, it’ll take a little getting used to.
Vista now has a full-featured backup program. It’s still somewhat anemic, but there is the option to make a full system backup, which can run in the background while the machine is still used. I created a full backup but have not attempted a restore yet. As well, data backups can be performed, which I did not try, but it seems to be just like the old Windows backup.
Over the next several weeks, I will continue to use Vista as much as possible and report on what I find. I want to get into the use of Windows Mail (Outlook Express on steroids), IIS, and other built-in features as well as attempt installing other software to see how it does.
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