I have now been running Vista as my primary OS at work since my previous post. In that post I mainly pointed out the negative in Vista, although my stance on Vista has not changed much I have found it to not be as bad as originally reported. It is still a pain to manage, but it is doable.
One of the first things I originally noticed about Vista was the fact that all menus are hidden. I still do not understand why Microsoft did this, the menus make common tasks so much easier, such as copying and pasting. If you do not know the keyboard shortcuts to do these common tasks it takes quite a few clicks to complete the tasks. It seems like they have dumbed down everything to make it not as scary to the new user. The problem is that they completely forgot about all of the average computer users who know how to use a computer already.
I have no problem navigating through Vista as I already know the keyboard shortcuts that thankfully did not change. I have had quite a few problems locating common features in the operating system. I have yet to find a feature that is no longer in the OS, it is just in a completely different place. Quite often the reason for not finding a feature is that they have moved it to a more logical place. (Wow, MS doing something logical?) We are all so used to things being illogical in Windows that it is hard to get used to a little bit of logic.
One of my biggest problems with Vista at the moment is the drivers. I know this has nothing to do with Mircosoft, but it is still an issue. The actual problem in the business world is the lack of good printer drivers, especially 64bit ones. At work we have Xerox printers that worked great out of the box, no problems what so ever. My personal printer is a HP and I have yet to get it working, directly connected or via a Win 2k network shared printer. HP acts like it wants to work, but it seems that the 64bit version of Vista is still not supported. Another printer of ours is a Kodak thermal printer, it just plain does not work. Windows rejects the drivers from the start, no false positives here.
I know that this current period of time is for letting the hardware manufacturers produce drivers for Vista. I am waiting for some good drivers to come out, but have yet to see anything updated for Vista 64bit support. I am also waiting for these same companies to put out drivers for Linux, but thats another box of crackerjacks.
A few days ago I was bored at lunch and opened up minesweeper. Holy… it was updated! All of the sudden I was in a much prettier version of the game, no more windows 98 style of game! It’s its like going from a 1998 web site to a web 2.0 style, simply amazing — graphics wise. The game play is still exactly the same, but that was to be expected. After a few games I had to see the other games that came with it. Solitaire has been completely redone, it was actually fun to play solitaire again. It is one of those things that you just have to play it to really see the differences. They’ve also added a few other games which are fun to blow time, if you happen to have time to blow.
Microsoft has said that blue screens do not exist in Vista, or at least they have made them prettier. I found out this was not the case today. I was surfing amazon.com and a few other sites trying to look for some funky X-acto blades and all of the sudden the computer froze for a few seconds, then *POOF* blue screen! It was exactly like the old Windows 98 blue screens with the core dumps and all. There was nothing pretty about this, it was a normal ol’ blue screen that we have all seen and
From a security standpoint Vista has made some remarkable upgrades from XP. To now install any software you need to give it permission. This is going to make it much, much harder to install software in the background, such as virii and other badware. I have to commend Microsoft for doing something right here.
A problem that I have had with Vista is its brand new TCP/IP Stack. Microsoft has tried to clean up its problems in the past with buffer overflows and such by creating a new Stack, but like anything new in the security world its going to have problems. The problem I have had is that it just stops working after two or three days use. The stack will not come back now matter what I do, restarting the network connections, resetting them, nothing. The only solution I have found is to restart the system. I am sure that the crackers (or hackers as the media calls them) have already found holes in this new system to exploit. There is going to be holes, there is no getting around it. The only real question is if Microsoft is going to be quick at fixing them or if they are going to close their eyes and imagine that they are not there.
If you are a Windows user you will eventually use Vista. Personally I do not recommend switching to Vista any time soon, it needs quite a bit of work still. It will probably be ready for stable use after service pack one or sp2 like XP. If you don’t wait for Vista itself to be ready, then you should wait for the drivers to at least be ready. This might happen by January when it is released to the public.
