February 23rd, 2007

Windows Vista - 19 months of usage and counting

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 3:18 am

Categories: Microsoft, Vista

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I downloaded my first beta of Windows Vista on July 27th 2005.  Over that 19 month period I've been making increasing use of Vista platform.  In a few weeks I hope that all the main rigs here at the PC Doc HQ will be running Vista and that XP (along with Windows 2000 will be relegated to test machines and VMware installs).

Since my blogging colleague George Ou posted his Week one report card for Vista, I thought it would be interesting to share with you some of my thoughts and feelings about the platform having been using it for over a year and a half.

Interface

First off, the interface.  Let me just start off by saying that by the time Vista RTM was released, the Vista interface no longer felt new or different to me.  I've spent a long time with Vista on one PC and running another PC with XP Pro on it via remote desktop.  Since I run a dual monitor rig I can have Vista in one screen and XP in the other and I've been able to compare and contrast the Vista with XP over a number of beta releases.  I think that it was very beneficial to be able to go through all the beta releases for Vista and see how the platform evolved from being a tweaked XP into what Vista is now. 

From an efficiency point of view, Vista beats XP hands down (I'd also say that it beats Mac OS X too, but I've been using Vista a lot longer than Mac OS for that to be a fair comparison).  It's the small things that make the difference - the improved Start Menu (which a lot of people hate because it involves scrolling - my tip is to get a scrolling mouse and learn how to use it), improved search, the larger, more detailed icons (which are a real eye saver if you run at screen resolutions of 1280 x 1024 and above). 

Aero is nice but it's not an essential aspect of Vista.  Yes, it's pretty and yes, it is eye candy, but I'm still running it (and I used to be someone who would cut down on most of the cheesy effects that were contained in the XP theme).  What Aero does is for the first time give you a truly 2.5D desktop in Windows. 

Another surprise is the the fact that I still have the sounds switched on.  With all versions prior to Vista the first thing I used to do was kill the sounds because they were intrusive and annoying.  Vista is a lot better and so far the sounds have survived (with the exception of that annoying startup sound!).  The fonts are also nice and readable and improve the overall usability of the operating system, as does ClearType (a feature that I was never all that fond of on XP).

I'm not going to pretend that Vista's interface is a million miles ahead of XP's.  It's not.  Put the two systems side-by-side and there are a lot of similarities (elements such as the Quick Launch toolbar and the System Tray are pretty much unchanged).  What I would say is that Microsoft has made the interface tweaks where they were needed and kept other things the same.

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