Occasional Observations

Helping a colleague log-on to a Windows XP machine for the first time – and work through all those niggly issues that I’d forgotten with Vista made me wonder if I’ve been a bit harsh. Thing is, it seems that neither is perfect … the Vista guys have worked hard to counter many of those XP annoyances that I’d oh-so-quickly forgotten … country keyboard settings, multiple language installations, administrator rights required to do mutt stuff like change the system time. Therefore, by the time we get to Vista SP2 it should be pretty good.

After almost a month of testing Vista Ultimate, I'm starting to get a clear picture of its strengths and weaknesses. Here's a quick rundown of some pros and cons that are the most obvious ? and will be to you, if you upgrade. Before going any further I must point out that I'm working with the full version, not an RC.

On the positive side, it's pretty stable, and so is Office 2007. They're obviously designed to work together and in Office, they've fixed many, many of those little scratchy things like integrity checks on PST mail folders, document recovery, spam filters, plus message handling and RSS feeds for Outlook.

If you've got a lot of memory and a suitably-muscular graphics card, then you'll enjoy Aero ? I'm getting used to, and starting to appreciate it, on a notebook with 1.5GB of RAM, but on an older PC whose graphics card couldn't cut the mustard, and had only 512MB of RAM, Vista was a disaster ? even with all the funky optics switched off. It reminded me of the drawn-out system instability that used to lead to bluescreens in Windows 3 ? slow responses, then nothing, then eventually the BSOD.

On the negative side, if you don't have 1GB or more of memory, then add ?50 to the upgrade cost as you'll need it. Vista is a hefty system and on my notebook, seems to require around 600MB of memory before I open any applications.

Some stuff also looks like it should never have come out of Beta ? especially the now-hated Windows Mobile Device Center, which really is a nightmare to sync with Delly. It's less likely to crash if you start WMDC before connecting a PDA, but then you've also got to get used to the icon for plain old sync center (not to be confused with the WMDC even though they both show the PDA) churning away for hours on end.

Microsoft has committed a heinous crime in appending an x to all standard Office file types as default ? so docx, pptx, xlsx. Try to open this in an older version of Office and you'll get a message saying it's not compatible. That and the lack of drop-down menus in PPT, Word and Excel (but, strangely, they're still there in Outlook) ? I'd prefer to believe that the product team just plain forgot to add them ? will have people screaming and running. I'm betting that it won't be long before someone releases a hack that reinstates the drop-down menus. As for the x ? I've already changed my defaults back to "compatibility mode".