So, I’m on.. almost a week since my purchase of a new laptop (model to be disclosed later in a separate review) and it has Windows Vista Home Edition on it. I am contemplating upgrading to Windows Vista Business 64 bit to see if that works better (the CPU is 64 bit compatible).

So far my experience with Windows Vista, overall, has been positive, but there are glitches, obviously (nothing’s perfect). The visual, and the navigational presentation is more than superb, and it is much easier for me to navigate through compared to XP. At the same time, the basic elements, and where to find things etc. are on an extension from Windows XP so it’s not difficult at all to migrate through.

Here are the good things I have to say about it :

• The Start Menu Bar is simply superb compared to that of XP. Instead of the fly-out style menus that used to coer up the whole screen if you have a lot of apps (and I certainly do), it has an internal navigation system that opens the items under items in the shape of trees. Also, accompanied with that is a quick search bar - I know this is a rip-off from Mac OSX, and it’s a good thing to copy for sure!
• The gadgets are handy. They stay on the side of the screen on the desktop (or you can set it to be on top all the time), and you can add more gadgets that are developed by Microsoft and other 3rd party programmers. For more information on downloading gadgets for Windows Vista, read this article that explaines the API and SDK as well as the download site.I downloaded a few gadgets myself - The Google search bar, the Weather Ticker, etc. The Stock ticker you see is already part of Windows Vista upon installation.

  Another very handy gadget is the CPU/RAM monitor, which is also installed by default. You can add more gadgets, and if there are too many for one screen, you can switch between them through the arrow key at the top.

• The Windows Vista Explorer is much better to use. It uses a combination of the tree, and a path depth bar at the top (which is new in Vista). Not only can you click through the tree, but you can click on any folder that the current item is part of directly without having to scroll back up. When you have a folder that has 50 different folders under it, you no longer have to scroll up the tree in order to find another folder above the level!Also note that the new explorer has the favorite links in a smaller size. Remember how XP and Windows 2000 used to have the chunky large icons for “Desktop” or “My Documents”? Not anymore. This is a space saver, which allows for both the favorites and trees to show up on the side bar altogether.

  

Now, things I don’t like about it are the following :

• If printing is a very important part of your business, check to make sure there is a printer driver available for your machine. The driver that Vista auto-detected for my Lexmark 6250 is no good - I cannot print anything, although the printer installation status and the model name etc. are correct. When I checked the Lexmark website, it told me that a driver for Vista will be available for my printer model by the end of this month. I have to go another 30 days (or more) without being able to print at home. For me that is manageable, so it’s no big deal - my other office that I use has a printer anyhow.
• Sometimes the keystrokes get messed up. I’ve noticed incidents where the “Print Screen” button doesn’t work well, and the slash key returned a totally different character in some applications (it returned a lower case E with an accent on it, like I’m typing French!!!). Also, I’ve had situations where the Korean-English transition did not work well at all! Sometimes it requires re-booting.
• Firefox support is horrible. Well, I can’t blame Vista on this one - Firefox is a 3rd party app that they have no obligation towards. But I’ve had so many little Firefox problems I can’t even list them all right now. Chiefly, I noticed an error where the cache keeps loading, even though I keep clearing the cache and re-loading it. Once I re-load in IE, it updates in FF too. This was only temporary (thankfully!) and it’s fine now. Also, the Web-Developer plugin wasn’t doing too well - it kept giving up pop-ups with some sort of error in the extra layer.
• It is slower than XP. That’s a given. I turned off many of the advanced graphic features, and will leave them off until I get some more RAM for this puppy.
• Just like when XP was first introduced, it does have its glitches of crashing my apps once in a while. Dreamweaver crashed on me once today, and Firefox has crashed once a few days ago too. Photoshop crashed once when I clicked on the Dreamweaver/Illustrator/Photoshop/Ace FTP/Firefox icons in a row , and I started switching between windows. That was for testing purposes - I’m not stupid.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Software, Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.