The GUI is the most visible change. It now has this really cool contrasty color scheme. Lots of things glow when you mouse over them and there are lots of neato visual effects when you actually click somewhere. The Windows-Tab flippy-twisty-ooh-ah-wow task switcher is cool to watch and to use to impress your friends but it's just an extension of alt-tab switching, which now includes thumbnail views of your active screens and is a whole bunch more efficient. The thumbnail view when mousing over a task bar button is actually useful (think seven IE buttons with obscure addresses) and it includes the friend-impressing cool factor, too.
I'm told there is more and better security in Vista. That lulls me into a wonderfully euphoric sense of false assurance that me and my data are safe but mostly it's a pain in the ass. For almost anything you want to do, Windows will cheerfully ask you if you are sure you want to take that action... sometimes, it does it twice. "Are you sure you want to open the control panel?" [yes] "Hey! Someone is trying to open the control panel. Cancel or Allow?" [Allow]. They might as well have put Clippy, the office assistant from MS Office 97 up there. (insert voice of Gilbert Gottfried here) "It looks like you're trying to change some settings on your computer. I can help you with that because you can't possibly be trusted to do this on your own or you might irrevocably change something (you do know what that means, don't you? It means you can't change it back), then we'd all be screwed and you'll have to actually pay someone to fix your computer. Are you sure you want to do that?" What you were trying to do in the first place was to turn off Clippy.
One new and improved feature I actually like (but isn't necessarily worth the price of the upgrade) is the Windows Photo Gallery. This handy little program pops up whenever you double-click an image file such as a .gif or .jpg file. There's one built in to Windows XP, too, but Microsoft took the concept and actually made many useful improvements. At first glance, it doesn't look much different. It has a couple of extra controls at the bottom and there's a toolbar at the top. Now, however, as you're clicking through your photo collection and stumble across a .mpg or.avi movie, it actually plays in the Photo Gallery instead of putting up the useless message of "preview not available." The part I like, though, is a button at the top left which says "go to gallery."
When you click Go To Gallery, the program switches and you end up with what looks like, at first glance, a Windows Explorer window showing thumbnails of all the pictures in your particular folder. Upon closer examination, however, you notice that, rather than a folder browser, the left side of the screen has different categories such as tags (yes, you can add metadata to your pictures), date, ratings, and folders. Plus, when you mouse over one of the thumbnails, you'll be treated to a slightly larger pop-out version of the image. All very handy.
Windows media center has been available since Windows XP (if you bought the right version) and is available in the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Vista. The first thing you notice when activating this monstrosity is that it completely switches your environment. Your screen goes black and up comes the MC interface as if you've switched off your computer and turned on your television set. Don't worry, you can still do that Windows-Tab flippy-twisty-ooh-ah-wow task switch thing and get back to your solitaire game if you really want to.
So now you sit in front of the calming blue screen which defaults to "TV + Movies." I don't have a tuner card since I haven't had cable in five years (I use satellite) so the best this segment can offer me is "play DVD" for which I have dedicated programs that work much better.
I decided to see how well it would do with my music collection. I mean, it's here, it's included, it's my "entire digital entertainment library in full glory," what could be better? Pretty much anything.
After deciding which folders to have it scan, I was treated to a view allowing me to browse my music by cover art. Very neat and cool but the thumbnails load a little slow and, honestly, I don't really know which albums what songs came from (nor do I much care most of the time) so I switched to the artists view. I was slapped in the face by an interface that could only have been designed by some perverse reject from Playskool. The font used to list artists was so huge that I was only able to view ten artists at a time. I looked in the settings, but there's no way to change the font size or change the configuration of the list. When I tried to scroll through the list...
I'm going to pause my rant here so that I can give you an assessment of the capability of my computer. I have a 3.06 gigaHertz Intel Celeron processor and a gigabyte of RAM. This configuration is more than adequate for Vista's basic requirements but is far from optimal. Most functions work pretty well but I occasionally run into a little sluggishness. Oddly enough, I put this computer together with the purpose of playing Doom 3 in mind. Doom 3 requires a 1.5 gHz processor and 384 MB of RAM with a Radeon 8500 graphics card or better (I have a Radeon 9600). I should be solid, right? True enough under XP - I could run Doom 3 in 1024 x 768 resolution with a decent frame rate but Vista sucks up so much resources that Doom 3 will now barely run on my machine in its lowest resolution.
As you move your mouse to the right (or left), handy little arrow heads appear in the list to inform you that there is more to see. When using this behemoth that is Windows Media Center, my poor, paltry 3 gHz processor and gig of RAM make me click and wait as windows scrolls through my list of hundreds of artists. I don't even want to think about scrolling through my thousands of songs by title. Never mind the fact that all of this requires that your ID3 tags be accurate and there is no way to browse by file name. I'll stick with Media Monkey, thank you.
All in all, Vista isn't too bad. If it hadn't been a gift, however, I would probably be pissed at how much I spent on it. If you absolutely must have the latest and greatest or just want to be ready when your employer asks you about Vista, dive right in. If Windows XP is working for you (and all of your devices), stick with it at least a few more months until hardware manufacturers and software publishers actually post Vista versions of their drivers and products. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD WINDOWS VISTA BE INTRODUCED TO A BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT AT THIS TIME. The lagging hardware and software support could cause way too many headaches.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment