It is Tuesday night and I have been running Vista since Sunday afternoon.
I was excited when I installed it, since Vista was such a new release.
I was going to be one of the first kids on the block to run it! I am not normally
so quick to convert to a new OS, but it just so happened that I was rebuilding my
laptop that day (don’t ask). So what do I think after 3 full days of living
with this shiny new toy?
Thanks, but no thanks.
I am not a Microsoft basher, avowed or otherwise. Honestly, I am a huge fan
of most things MS produces in the development space; MS Office is fine (if severely
bloated), and the ASP.Net platform is amazingly powerful. MS does languages,
development tools, productivity, and Internet very well, but apparently
not Operating Systems. Ouch! Keep in mind that I am not commenting on
ANY of the developer glitz buried in there like XAML, WFFS, or anything. This
is simply from a the standpoint of an every day user.
What I Like:
- The UI is better. It looks like OSX without the excitement.
- Many of the dialogs buried in the UI are simpler and cleaner.
- Network connectivity applet and UI. The way you can see your network connections
as a flow model is pretty slick.
What I Don’t Like:
- 800 MB used by the OS? What? You gotta be kidding me. C’mon, I know
that MS pushes hardware standards with every new release of Windows, but for the first
time I am asking, “Why”? I have 2G in my machine and the OS is eating almost
half. Ridiculous. - The Start > All Programs menu is confusing and annoying. I am try really
hard to learn to use it, but I will probably go back to the classic style. The
UI paradigm for the menu is just bad. - Windows File Explorer is chock full of confusing links, buttons, and gizmos that are
simply unnecessary. It takes far too much thought to browse my C: drive.
Honestly, I cannot see any reason that a common user will find this software compelling.
I’ll tell you what is starting to become more compelling with each passing Windows
version: Unix.