Vista Review

So I’ve been using Vista as my main OS for almost 2 months now.  Time to give a short run down on the Good, Bad, and Ugly.

Good

• Areo Glass Theme.  Sorry OS X but Areo Glass is so much prettier then you.
• Changing Themes Color. Right now I’m digging green.

• Ready Boost.  I got a 4 gig USB card helping free the hard drive of tedious task and extending my laptop’s battery.
• Stable.  This should be a given but no blue screen, freezes, or spinning beach balls.  I would say this is the most stable OS I have ever used.
• Sleep Mode.  This never worked 100% of the time with XP.  No problems so far in Vista.
• Search.  Being able to search from the Windows start menu is almost enough to make me get rid of SlickRun, almost.

• Snipping Tool. Finally Windows ships with a much better screen capturing tool.
• No more “My Documents” or ”My Pictures”.  They have renamed them to “Documents” & “Pictures”, finally.
• New Movie Maker.  A nice upgrade over it’s predecessor. 
• DreamScene.  This is really, really cool, having a movie play as your background. It does draw a on resources though, that is why I don’t have it on 100% of the time.

Bad

• Remote Desktop.  Until my fellow Network IT guys upgrade Terminal Services on ALL of the servers, I have to type in my password twice OR type it in something once so I get the Windows login prompt.  Come on guys, backward compatibility is a good thing.

• No more NetMeeting :(  So Net Meeting is old & didn’t have a ton of features, but it worked as expected.  Looks like you can contact Microsoft to get a special NetMeeting installer for Vista.

Ugly

• Cancel or Allow.  This feature works if you are a web surfer/emailer but no way for a power user like myself.  This is the first thing I turned off.

So far I have not ran into any driver problems or devices not working properly.  I’ll keep you updated.

Written by Tim on May 10th, 2007 with 5 comments.
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