| After reading David's
excitement from dropping Ubuntu for Vista, I decided to invest some time to
check the "latest and gratest" Windows. I didn't wanted to risk any of my existing
machines (most of them couldn't run Aero anyway), so I decided to get a decent
hardware for this experiment. I got: This baby scorred 5.4 in Windows experience test (whatever
that means) 
The first thing I've noticed was that Vista didn't
recognize my wide screen display. Even after installing the drivers from Philps
the best I was able to achieve was 1600x1024 (instead the panel's native 1680x1050). I spent few hours trying to fix that without any success, so I'm
going to change the monitor to something that's supported by Vista. I did all my tests on this very blurry display (sooo bad -- it made my eyes hurt)
I'll start with the facy stuff (as the list will be
shorter): - Task switching with [Win]-[Tab] is great - you get live
preview of all windows.
- Live preview of running apps when you roll-over them on the task
bar.
- The "start search" in the new start menu is very usefull for
finding documents, but I couldn't make it to find applications like cmd.com. It looks like a bad mimic for apple's spotlight.
- The new Open/Save dialog have nice features (but it takes
some time to get use to it)
- Folders show preview of what's inside them, which look nice
but it's quite unusable even when you use the largest possible icons.
- Integrated WebEx killer (Windows Collaboration)
- Integrated Picasa killer (Windows Photo Gallery)
- Integrated Adobe Premier killer (Windows Movie Maker)
Now let's look at the bad side of Vista: - I get very annoying popups every time when you start some
application that Vista doesn't like
(Windows Needs your permission to continue). What's more annoying is the flick
of the display when this message appears. It looks like it's changing the vidoe
resolution or something like that, but my display shuts down for 0.5 sec and
than it comes back. And this appears even when you try to start the device
manager or create a folder inside the Start Menu.
- If I try to delete application from the task bar, I get the
message that has the name of the app twice (did someone tested this at all).
- Yahoo Mail is not very happy from Vista
- The integreation of RSS feeds between IE7 and Outlook 2007 really
sucks. On startup Outlook, ask you to accept to import the RSS feeds. You get
one long flat list of RSS feeds. On the top of that there is no real way to
remove them, unless you don't remove them one by one (Poor RSS junies like me
who have 200+ feeds). And even if you try to import OPML file manually, you
again get a flat list (of course you can create the folders manually, but what's
the point of OPML then)
- I couldn't make the Weather gadget to work.(it says "service
not available" and there is no help what so ever)
- The RSS gadget looks cute, but it's completely useless, as
it allows you to look at either all your feeds or just one feed. And all the feeds need to be setup in IE7,
which as I already mention has limitations (can't work with pass-protected
feeds).
- Also there is a folder in the start menu called "maintance",
which I tried to rename to "Windows" several times without any success (no error message -- it just doesn't do anything).
Verdict
it's good to play with (if you can find the right
hardware for it), but I won't put this on my business notebook. Still Microsoft
is too much focused on copying what every one else is doing, instead of invote.
And having the inside look at
how Microsoft developed something as simple as shutdown interface, I doubt
we will see something better (if anything at all) from Microsoft in the future.
Maybe I should consider making the
switch. Only that all Apple notebooks are very havy (2 X my current Dell
X1), which makes big difference when riding Yamaha
YZF600 with over 160mph on I280 Lenkov Sofia, Bulgaria
Update [Dec-07-2007] After I changed my monitor to Nec 2070WNX, this totally changed my view on Microsoft Vista. Now it's possible to read what's on the screen.
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