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.

Tags: microsoft, vista

Yes, you read that title correctly. I installed the latest version of the Microsoft OS, Windows Vista, on my MacBook. I didn’t install it in a virtual machine using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, I actually used BootCamp and installed it directly on my MacBook in a separate partition. I did this for two reasons. Number one: I didn’t use VMWare Fusion or Parallels because my MacBook is one of the old ones that can only support up to 2 GB or RAM, so I would only be able to give my virtual machine around 1 GB and still have a responsive Mac. Windows Vista wouldn’t be a happy camper under 1 GB of RAM, especially since the reason I installed it is for reason number two. Number two: I realize at the end of the day, even though I love Apple and my Mac, the thing that brings home the paycheck is Microsoft development. We are getting into serious development at work now using .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0. I need to have a machine at home that I can use to work on, and I’d rather not have to lug around a laptop back-and-forth to work every day.

Now, as for why I installed Windows Vista Ultimate, when Windows Vista hasn’t exactly received stellar reviews? I had a copy that I got for free for attending a Microsoft developer session a few weeks back, and didn’t feel like scouring the web to find a pirated version of Windows XP.

I don’t see myself booting into Windows very often, but it’s nice to have the option. This is actually the reason I waited until Apple switched over to the Intel platform, so I would have the option to install Windows. I’ve played around with Vista for a few minutes now, this is the first time I’ve really used it, and while I don’t think it’s as great as OS X, I do think it’s more pleasing on the eyes than Windows XP. It also seems to be running pretty responsively, which is good. We’ll see how it goes once I start doing development on it.

Tags: microsoft, apple, vista

Microsoft released a new commercial last night. It’s part of their $300 Million dollar ad campaign to try and revamp their image after the Vista fiasco. The first two advertisements in their new ad campaign were pretty awful. It had Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, and the ads really made no sense. Some people joked that the ads were like the Seinfeld show, they were commercials about nothing. Now, they did get people’s attention, but not exactly in a good way.

The new advertisement is better than the first two. You can watch it on the Microsoft site if you haven’t seen it yet. The new commercial has a Microsoft employee that happens to look like the PC guy, from the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” Apple commercials. He starts off by saying, “I’m a PC, and I’ve been stereotyped”, then it goes on to show a lot of people saying that they are a PC and that they do important things. The thing that the marketing company, and a lot of other people in the forums talking about the commercial seem to miss, is in the Apple commercial, the two guys are supposed to represent computers. That’s why they say “I’m a PC”, not, “I’m a PC user”. Apple is saying that PCs are boring, beige boxes that people hide under their desk, because they look bad, while Apple computers are great looking machines that people are proud to display. It seems that a lot of people, including the marketing firm that did these commercials, seems to think that Apple was saying Mac users are young and hip while PC users are guys in suits; which isn’t what the ads say.

I did see a funny quote. The tag line of the new Windows campaign is, “Life without walls”. If you have no walls, you don’t need Windows : )

Another funny thing, apparently the ad talking about how great it is to be a PC, was created on a Mac.

Tags: microsoft

I first used one of the Microsoft Application Blocks a few years ago, and needless to say, I wasn’t all that impressed. We tried to use the caching application block. It was more a pain than it was worth. Because of this I was a little reluctant to use any of the application blocks again, but after seeing a quick presentation on the Validation Application Block from a co-worker, I decided to give it a shot. The application blocks have come a long way. The code is a lot cleaner now, and it feels like the overall design is better. I guess it’s like a lot of Microsoft applications; version 1 sucks, but it slowly gets better with each subsequent version.

Tags: .net, microsoft, software

I see that Microsoft has put in a bid of 44 Billion to purchase Yahoo! I have a couple issues with this, and it's not all about my dislike for Microsoft. It's more to do with the fact that I like how Yahoo! supports developing sites that work across platforms and browsers. Yahoo! Mail works nicely, although I did just ditch my pro account with Yahoo! because I have been in the process of switching over to GMail. Yahoo has some great engineers and developers that have developed their YUI (Yahoo User Interface) tools. These tools allow web developers to create sites that have a rich interface, without having to come up with all the javascript. I also like Flickr, which is where I store my photographs. It has a great interface, and uses Flash and Flex a lot where they really need the slick interface. They are also big on using Free BSD and PHP. If Microsoft purchases them I have the feeling that a lot of this will change, which would suck. When Microsoft bought Hotmail a lot of the users at the time left, because like most products they buy, it gets worse afterward. I can already see all the Flash being replaced with Silverlight, and sites suddenly working better on Windows with Internet Explorer for all the extra goodies. I hope I am wrong that all this would occur, but this is Microsoft we're talking about, so it's not very far fetched.

Tags: microsoft, yahoo