Reminding me that Vista is exciting
3rd February 2007
Lots of news this week about the disappointment of Vista. Yes, the security is leaps and bounds better than XP (and that’s enough reason by itself that we should upgrade, but then we should eat more vegetables, we should exercise more, we should stay at our desks when the email goes around about free doughnuts in the break room). And the driver model is a lot more stable, but it’s also new and so Vista generally doesn’t match XP for games performance right now, if you can even get the drivers for your video card. The rest of it? Well, most people think it’s just some fancy graphics.
But hold on.
I’ve been running Vista for a few months now and have gotten used to it. So when all this press started coming out about, well, the mere competence of Vista I didn’t disagree that much.
Until last night, when I installed it on Dawn’s computer and I saw it through her eyes.
The OS does look a lot nicer than XP. SuperFetch makes it faster use: Dawn had been using IE7, Office 2007, and MSN Messenger just a couple of hours previously on XP and, without my prompting, talked about how Word and Excel seemed to launch more quickly and that everything just seemed snappier. She can actually put her one-month-old computer with two monitors to sleep and have it wake up properly. The system-wide searching, and the ability to search the Start menu, are going to transform the way she works with her computer. Seriously. We finally have reliable backup. And she loves the convenience and extra protection of Shadow Copies. She’s not yet excited about all the metadata that Explorer support on files, but she was impressed when I showed her how to apply keywords to photos and then how to find that photo with a simple search from the Start menu. I’m not going to list all the new features but I was surprised to see the operating system from fresh eyes and realize that Vista is not just an incremental improvement over XP. It’s a serious change in the usability of Windows.
Maybe we need to take Chris Pirillo up on his offer.
February 4th, 2007 at 14:39
Tommy, thanks for this review! Most of the news I’ve seen this week focused on the launch *activities* and a half-second screen shot of the platform, rather than talking much about the features and benefits.
I’d heard a lot of coworkers saying much the same as you, but I didn’t make the switch before I left for fear of messing up my processes and missing regular deadlines (I’m a terrible creature of habit).
Nevertheless, I have been dying to try it out. Perhaps it’s finally the perfect time to turn my 2002 Vaio in…
July 21st, 2007 at 11:58
I’ve found that Vista is just a delight; I use the search feature, and then filter for just Email all the time; it’s leaps and bound better than Windows Desktop Search available on Windows XP.
What’s more exciting is Office 2007 - flattening out the menu makes things so much easier to even remember to use - yes, it took time getting to remember what was where, but now I find it strange the way Office 2003 has its menus.