Thoughts on Vista
Oct 27 2008 10:33 PM Filed in: Microsoft
As I mentioned in an earlier post I installed
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook a
couple weeks back. Now that I’ve had a chance to use
it a little, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.
I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.
So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.
Likes:
1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.
Dislikes:
1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.
I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.
I never used Microsoft Vista before installing it on my Mac. I have seen it on a couple users machines at work, but never sat down and used it myself. The copy of Vista Ultimate I received from the Microsoft event has Service Pack 1 installed on it. I’ve heard that SP1 fixes a lot of the gripes that people had with Vista. It runs pretty darn fast on my MacBook Core Due with 2 GB RAM. There was a time when the machine that was rated best to run Vista was a Mac; I don’t know if that is still true.
So, here are my likes, and my dislikes.
Likes:
1. The UI is a heck of a lot better that the XP Playskool look.
2. The side bar gadgets are nice, very similar to Widgets on Mac OS X, but still nice.
3. The search that’s built in is a lot better than the previous search in Windows. It works almost as well as Spotlight on Mac OS X.
4. It boots and shuts down quickly.
5. I like that they got rid of the stupid “My Computer”, “My Music”, etc, and just replaced it with “Computer”, “Music”.
Dislikes:
1. The security feature is very weird. If it needs to pop up a dialog to get your permission your screen goes black before doing so. Also, the security dialog that pops up isn’t all that helpful. I double clicked a program to install it, it popped up a dialog with the name of the program, and if I clicked more info, it showed a GUID. How the heck does that help? It just seems kind of tacked on.
2. The new start menu sucks. When you first click on it, it looks nice. If you click on All Programs, it just turns into a long scrolling list. Not very nice looking.
3. At the end of the day, while it looks nice, I don’t really see what would take a team of engineers the size that Microsoft has, 5 years to develop this OS.
I don’t consider it to be as bad as I’ve heard, but then again I received a free copy. I don’t think I would have felt it was worth the $259 for Ultimate.
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