When I started my new gig on the 15th of this month, I was handed a new laptop to do all my work on. It’s a nifty little gadget with 3GB RAM! Very schmick. There was one catch..
… see, the company is migrating to Vista, which means I have to use it too. A while ago I posted my thoughts with regards to installing Vista, so as you can imagine it’s a little bit strange having to use it.
So after two weeks of using it, how have I found it? Well, for a beefy machine with this much RAM, I’d expect more. It doesn’t feel any faster than my desktop, which is nearly 4 years old and runs Windows XP Pro x64. It’s a little disappointing in that regard. Rather than speak about things in general, here are the list of things that I do like about it…
Windows explorer breadcrumbs. This feature is one that is sorely missed in Windows XP. Having the ability to leap to anywhere in the folder hierarchy at the click of a button is a real winner. I know you have similar functionality in XP, but you have to repeatedly click the “up folder” button, which is just crap. It might be not be something that I’ll use a lot, but it’s nice to have.
The look of Aero. The new coat of paint is nice and is a bit of a breath of fresh air. That’s about all I have to say.
The application search feature in the Start menu. This is something I use all the time. Shortcuts take to look to find with the mouse, and typing is SOOO much faster. Excellent feature. Shame it took so long to appear!
Built-in “open command window here” function. To get this feature in Windows XP, you needed to install a power toy. Thankfully, to do this in Vista, all you need to do is hold down the SHIFT key when you right-click the mouse in Windows explorer. Easy peasy.
With the good things out of the way, here are the things that I find pretty darned awful…
The performance of Aero. It’s woeful. A machine with this amount of grunt shouldn’t struggle to render the UI. The fact that it does makes me feel that there’s way too much going on behind the scenes. I’d be willing to go back to XP so I can have a UI that’s responsive.
The new Aero window switcher (accessible via Windows Key + TAB). Who uses it? ALT + TAB does the job, why bother with an overly resource-intensive, animated version that does the same thing but slower?
Window previews of everything (sorry, no screenshot, because I turned it off). Every time you move the mouse you seem to get a window popping up with a mini-preview in it. It drove me nuts, so I had to kill it.
Windows explorer performance. Is it just me, or does it take an ice-age for the file explorer to become responsive after you open it (that is, more than three seconds)? Displaying a list of files and whatnot on your machine should be lightening fast. It isn’t on this machine.
Network browsing performance. It sucks. Both at work and at home the speed of network browsing is just woeful. I know for sure that it’s Vista playing silly-buggers, because on both of those networks the XP machines are lightening fast.
UAC. I don’t need to say any more about this, because it’s been said a million times before by many other people.
There are other things that I do and don’t like, but I don’t consider them to be worth noting because they’re the kind of things that you find in most operating systems 
So have any of you been using Vista (either by choice or by force)? If so, how are you feeling about it?
October 29, 2007
because vista was so bad when it came out, in terms of MS dev tools, I actually started out running a virtual machine with an XP image. It worked out so well, I haven’t had a reason to install my dev tools on the host OS. In fact, I quite like the seperation of concerns, as it allows me to concentrate my host PC setup on gaming, and allows me to take my dev setup on the road with my laptop (which also runs the VM quickly).
I have used virtualisation in the past, and it was ssslllllloooowwwwww, but now it’s dead quick, so much so that it offers a better option to dual booting for this kind of use.
How are you finding Vista with the MS dev tools? I know there have been a number of patches to address the early issues, but I haven’t tried them.
Chrs
P.
October 29, 2007
hey, I’m English, get rid of that silly American flag next to my name OJ. I want the St. George’s Cross!!!!
October 29, 2007
Be thankful that I haven’t forced it to show a German flag for you!
October 29, 2007
To answer your question, the dev tools seem to be ok. I haven’t had to do a great deal with the dev tools as yet, so I’ll have to report on the status later down the track when I’ve used them in anger.
October 29, 2007
Personally OJ, I’ve had a pretty favourable (note the spelling versus the flag at the bottom - fix it OJ
- I think it’s because we’re posting from work.) experience with Vista.
I’ve run various incarnations for well over a year now. From the early betas in VM’s and I ran Beta 2 for ages on my old(ish) tablet-laptop (1.2Ghz, 2Gig RAM), using it for work meetings, development (mostly VS2005) and a media centre PC for those long-haul-couch-potato-Lost-and-24-marathons! Obviously I have had a significant number of problems that come with using beta versions - but not nearly as bad as beta 1 and I was pleasantly surprised at the fact that pretty quickly I got to a point where I was as productive as I was previously on XP (tablet version) on that same laptop.
“But it should be LOADS better than XP I hear you protest!”. This is precisely where I feel Vista has become the victim. For once, not only has the Microsoft PR Engine(TM) made it difficult for the product under promotion to live up to expectations, it has made it impossible! Touting useless “features” such as DRM as a security blanket for the user when in fact it is just a way of hand-cuffing and (at best) irritating legitimate buyers and similarly over-hyping concepts like security, speed and productivity.
If memory serves, the first of the Matrix movies and Star Wars:Episode I, launched around the same time (Matrix just before Star Wars I think). I remember that The Matrix was a relative unknown compared to the marketing clout being thrown at George’s latest creation. I actually went to see The Matrix by accident without having seen a trailer, simply because I was
salivatinghanging around movie theatres waiting for Star Wars, and The Matrix was the only thing I hadn’t seen yet! Long story short, The Matrix blew me away, while Star Wars simply could not live up to the hype no matter what. Personally I don’t think Episode I was a bad movie in it’s own right, in fact I thoroughly enjoyed it - it was just that I too(whilst considering myself objective) was negatively affected by my perception that I would be in the throws of full orgasm throughout the entire the movie - if the marketing hyped were to be believed.The same syndrome struck Vista upon release. Microsoft’s WOW campaign was so miserably misplaced, that unless the new users of Vista, upon stepping inside the bubble, were transported to Utopia itself, became 400% more productive, had all their debt instantly erased and turned into lucky Mr. Gump with all that success overnight - it was never going to live up to the Wow-factor.
I remember when we were all using Windows 98 and 2000, and we started seeing early screenshots of Windows XP floating around. Giggled like school girls we did, at the silly use of colour. “God I hope we can change those back to normal looking windows…” we all said. “Who wants a great big Green Start Button anyway?”. We were all definitely much more under the impression that this was going to be a clown’s OS, probably a failure, just like Windows ME! Years later, we’ve all stopped changing the default themes of XP and are quite happy to accept a green start button and bright blue windows - and more than that - we’re indescribably grateful for the performance and productivity benefits of XP over 98. Not because we were hyped into it, but because we discovered it for ourselves with very low expectations to begin with. Not so with Vista. We now have the bar set (what I consider) pretty high, not only because of XP, but all the other good OS’s out there, and the only thing left for Microsoft to do is hype silly features because in truth, Vista is not really any better than XP in most respects, and in some - it got worse.
I’ve been using Vista x64 now since I built my new rig with very little trouble. Most of the driver problems I’ve had have not been due to Vista, but rather x64, but even they have been few and far between. I agree 100% with your points above regarding “features” - the ones you found useful, I did too, and I also would not miss that stupid Aero animated task switching if they removed it. But as far as performance goes, I have had a very comparable experience to XP. I still run XP on my other monster PC just in case but I haven’t turned it on in months now. Networking has not been a problem at all, in fact, things like mapped drives are now far more reliable in Vista and I copy 10’s of gigabytes of data at a time to my terastation without any hassles.
I really do think Vista has been over-hyped to the point where it will leave XP users with a bitter taste in their mouths no matter what. This is not because it is “not as good as XP”, it’s because it is “not much better than XP”. This has never been a problem for me because I have been using the betas, and my expectations have been kept fairly sane as a result. What is insane, is that users expect what they think should be, and what Microsoft promise from Vista. Microsoft has a notoriously bad reputation in delivering what they promise when they promise, so you only have yourself to blame if you thought Vista was going to be all-singing-all-dancing and still believe it should be.
In the end, Vista is every bit as good as XP, not worse. My needs, which are as far reaching as anyone else, development (VS2008) to gaming(DX10) to video/media editing and publishing to everyday tasks such as email and word processing. Vista more than cuts the mustard in this regard, as did XP. Is it worth the upgrade - for some of those features you mentioned in your article - I’d say “Yes”, but don’t put it up on a pedestal that it is sure to come crashing down from.
November 2, 2007
For me, it doesn’t cut it. There’s very little added , esp for business (there are NO compelling additions for business IMHO).
For me there’s at least 2 hugley disappointing results of upgrading to Vista. At rest my Vista install consumes 1Gb. I hate that (and for me the argument that RAM is cheap is going to comeback and haunt us when we’ll need more efficient computing).
The next biggie is for me an OS has a number of primary requirements (e.g. managing system resources). Vista manages to summarily fail in the File System department. In short you can’t copy large files. Not very large ones anyway. Even small sets of files being copied can take a large amount of time.
Sure I use it, but I’m not impressed with it..
November 2, 2007
AHA ! AHA!!!! Now there’s a flag!
Is it a Firefox / IE thing ??
November 2, 2007
Hi Ian! Haven’t seen you around these parts before
Thanks for commenting.
When you say that at rest Vista takes up 1Gb, I’m guessing you’re talking about (especially since you go on after to talk about it ;)). Apparently that’s by design. If check out this post at Coding Horror for a bit more information. I was concerned at the start as well.
File copying does indeed take ages. I get the feeling that the amount of complaints MS must have received for their dodgey efforts at estimating time for copying in XP they’ve overdone it with Vista - now it seems to take ages just to estimate time before it even starts to copy!
I’m on the same side as you. I can’t see a compelling reason to migrate.
And which flag are you talking about?
The one next to your name? Or the cheesy one in the address bar? The former is something I threw into my Wordpress install (it’s a plugin) and it tries to guess which country you’re in based on IP (and doesn’t always nail it). If it’s the latter, I abused an Aussie flag to make it fit as a favicon 
November 16, 2007
I’ve been using Vista since about April now. On my old PC is was chug city (had to set it to use the old skool desktop), but on my new machine with Vista64 it’s been superb.
I’m certainly not getting any 3 second delays whenever I open an explorer window. They did release a hotfix to sort out ridiculously long pauses during file operations a while back. Do you have this?
Anyway, on a new machine with hardware you can get drivers for Vista I’d go for it. On an older machine, definitely not. Even if you can get drivers, they’re usually quickly knocked together and not maintained very much (nVidia’s terrible drivers for the older nForce motherboards are a case in point).
April 20, 2008
Oh my God! To quote that fit bird from Dodgeball - “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little”
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/16/microsoft-burns-our-eyes-with-vista-promo-video/
April 20, 2008
Christ. That’s gotta be a joke, right?
Right?