A Look into Vista Part I
07.16.06 - 07:18pm
I really haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Vista as Conroe has been on my mind but I decided to take a step back and give Vista a little bit of my attention. To some people Vista is just another bump in the operating system road but for others Vista is a new wave of thinking. Vista tries to fix all the problems that have plagued previous editions of Windows and it seems to do this rather well while being rolled up into a fancy package. I decided to install and play with all the Vista targeted programs that I could find which included Microsoft Word 2007, Windows Media Player 11, and Internet Explorer 7. This suite of programs will be what greets the world when Microsoft finally launches Vista so why not take an early peek?
To start out on my adventure with Vista I downloaded the 32-bit version of Vista and burned the ISO image to a disk. Once the image was burned and all the data on my desktop was archived and saved I began the installation process. I had some issues with the Vista installation outside of Windows XP so I just initiated my installation from within XP. From the moment I popped in the installation disk I was surprised with how “cool” the installer looked. To be honest it reminded me of the default background for OS X Tiger but that was fine by me as it looked great. Once Vista had finished copying all the files it restarted my machine, booted into some barebone operating system and began uncompressing and installing Vista. The total installation time took around 45 minutes which was a bit longer than the typical XP install but was very understandable for the amount of material being transfered to the hard drive.
First Impression
Once the installation had finished up I had my first glance into Vista and I was shocked. Just imagine taking Windows XP and infusing a bit of “pretty” and blending it all together with a bit of additional security and pop-up windows. The initial things that I noticed was how cool the glass feature looked and the sidebar attached to the right edge of my right screen. Instead of the hard lines from Windows XP, Vista has these borders that bend and distort the background image like a piece of glass. You can adjust the intensity, saturation, and brightness of the border. Once I had a nice shade of purple and black I began playing with the Sidebar.
The Sidebar has very similar features to the dashboard in OS X. The sidebar displays various gadgets that perform all sorts of functions. My personal favorites are the notepad, CPU Meter, and the RSS feed watchers. This sidebar adds a severe penalty to the performance of my computer though, when I use the notepad the CPU usage rockets up to 100% for a few seconds and the machine just stutters. Just a heads up this will become a recurring theme through my time with Vista. Within the Sidebar properties there is an option to add more Gadgets and also to retrieve more from Microsoft. Unfortunately I am having troubles with my Internet connection so I won’t have a chance to test this feature right now.
User Interface
The Windows Search is another feature ripped out of Apple’s book. Located within the Start menu, when you begin typing in a word Windows will search your hard drive for programs that contain that word. I find this especially useful when I am trying to pull up programs that aren’t within my quicklaunch bar or within the immediate Start menu. This definitely makes up for the slightly more complicated Start menu. Unlike XP where the menus would cascade out to the right, the new Start menu simply opens up the folder and drops all the contents below it.
The Aero program switch is a really neat feature although it isn’t really necessary. The old alt + tab feature still works and when using it little thumbnails of the program are available. These programs are about 120×120 pixels and show a surprising amount of detail. The Aero rolodex flips through scaled down versions of the programs and make it possible for you to quickly flip though your entire queue of programs. Of the two I still find alt + tab to be more useful as it is quicker and it doesn’t look as choppy. The Aero rolodex just looks a little rough especially graphically as the program images have very jagged edges. Hopefully Microsoft will work on making this look a bit cleaner then perhaps it will replace alt + tab.
The preview feature built into Vista is very helpful especially for pictures. On my desktop I had a bunch of screenshots and instead of an icon for PNG’s I had thumbnails of the the images in question. This feature is also present when you slide your mouse over the menu bar. When there is a program you will be shown a thumbnail of it. This is just another helpful productivity tool built right into Vista.
In previous versions of Windows there was a basic image viewer that included basic picture manipulation tools like rotation and flipping. The new Photo Gallery Viewer has all the previous functions along with a cool slideshow function. With this slideshow function you can open up a folder and have Windows display a slideshow featuring all the pictures in that folder. These slideshows can have various included themes that will display your images against various backgrounds. One of the cooler themes is the Black and White theme which displays all your photos in black and white against a black background.
Conclusion
Until I can fix the Internet connection I will have to stop here. Once I have a router up and running I will show more details regarding security and productivity along with Word 2007 and WMP 11 pictures. Lately I seem to have fewer hours to devote to writing so I apologize for the recent gaps in posting.
Hi Chris. Hey, fellow blackbook owner. It does rock. I look forward to hearing your reporting on Vista. I’m a longtime Mac user, but as a tech geek, I like to keep up. Maybe Vista finally delivers the experience I get on a Mac. I doubt it, but Apple responds well to competition so this is good. I know they’ve hired a drobe of Apple people away, so I’m hoping VIsta lives up to the hype even it they did have to cancel a lot of the really sexy features they originally promised.
the information is very good and i realy like it