Vista RC2 - My Unbiased Opinion

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical

Alright, I’m not gonna bore you by introducing Vista. I’m sure all of you already know what Vista is, else go see Paul’s ultra lenghty review. I’ll go straight to the gist of my Vista experience.

Installation

Installation is really a breeze. Unlike XP where you’re prompted for language, date, timezone stuff in the middle of installation, when Vista does show that prompt, installation is already complete. One thing I didn’t like is that it “benchmarks” the computer for the Windows Performance Index. Pretty redundant in my opinion - can’t it just run in the background when the computer’s idle?

Things I Like

Windows Explorer, or better known as “My Computer”. It’s definitely much better now. There’s a bunch of “favourite links” on the left, much like Mac. I’m not sure bout Mac, but these links can be customized to your preferences. They’re just a bunch of shortcuts in C:\Users\username\Links.

Icon Preview. I’m not sure if that’s what it’s called, but Vista shows a sneak peak of folder contents right at the icon itself. You can choose the icon sizes too! Yeah, it’s not something really helpful, but cool nonetheless! :p

Hm, nothing else in particular actually. The search bar at the start menu actually works and is really handy. Also bundled is a “Snipping Tool” to quickly take screenshots. Ah, and the pre-built games look really, really cool.

Things to get used to

Well, that familiar symbol that we take as “Shut Down”, isn’t exactly shutdown! I’m guessing it’s hibernate. Sadly, I find booting up from a hibernate to be much slower than a shut down.

Things that I hate

User Account Control. It doesn’t work right, it pops up too darned often, takes too long to come up, and blocks some applications from writting it’s own configuration files.

And oh, the defragment tool is dumbbed down now. No more graphs..

Bugs..

Well, even if it’s RC2, there’s a number of bugs with the desktop window manager itself. For example, alt-tab sometimes screws up. And on 2 occasions, the cursor rendered without transparency.

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Permalink | January 29th, 2007

One Response to “Vista RC2 - My Unbiased Opinion”

  1. Jinny Says:
    January 30th, 2007 at 8:30 pm

    Info confirmation: Yep, the thingies on the side of Finder (OS X’s equivalent of Windows Explorer) can be customized to preference, I can even put my quickly and often accessed folders in there, and I can even put applications in there; for example, the Bluetooth File Exchange application: which I can then drag and drop a file into that “link” and send a file to another BT device automatically. Or I can put in a script that will do something, or put in.. er.. just anything :) It’s like the Dock, except it’s inside the Finder.

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