Playing with Vista

My sister has just got a new computer so trying to get a few things up and running on it for her I got playing around with Vista.

It’s an interesting experience. I realise that a lot of the problems caused are just due to the fact that I’ve never used Vista before – for example trying to find my way around the computer settings would take equally as long if I was using any version of Windows for the first time. Also, we are a species, generally don’t like change. So I tried to bare these in mind when complaining.

First of all, Windows prompts you for everything. It’s not enough to say that you want to manage the user accounts on the system. Once you’ve tried to go to that screen you then have to tell Windows you give it permission to show you that screen. While I’m sure this has security advances, I think the fact I have just clicked “manage user accounts” indicates I would like to manage user accounts.

Secondly, when saving a file from the internet you are given what is basically a small web browser rather than the standard Windows file save dialog. You get an address bar with the C:\Wherever as you would expect. You do not however get any kind of folder navigation and if you click the drop down arrow to find the other locations on your computer you will in fact find it is actually just a web address bar and will be presented with your most recent URLs. How quite you save a file to http://www.google.co.uk/ I don’t know but that appears to be what Windows is suggesting. It then moans if you try it and you need to switch to the folder browsing mode instead.

Things generally seem to take a bit longer. I can’t just hit control alt delete and access my task manager. I’m then taken to a sub-menu where it thinks I want to log off where I then have to select task manager. The start menu no longer appears nicely spaced out across the screen, it’s now all stuffed into a corner with an expanding tree still menu.

That said there are some nice touches to it. When alt tab’ing through the windows the desktop is now included in the list so you can easily hide all your programs to get access to your desktop icons. Also if you hover over anything on your task bar it will show you a thumbnail of the window.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.