Hi all,<br><br>Comments in-line...<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/2/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Michael Erskine</b> <<a href="mailto:msemtd@yahoo.co.uk">msemtd@yahoo.co.uk</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi all,<br><br>I think we could go on and on about the perceived (and real!) problems with<br>the newly Microsoft Windows Vista for some time but not really get much out<br>of it except for perhaps the reloading of old grudges and the venting of old
<br>frustrations.<br><br>As Graeme may have pointed out, the FUD slinging is unlikely to do much good<br>so what I'd like to encourage is the honest (non-sarcastic) discussion of the<br>_positive_ _first-hand_ experiences of Vista that our members have, and the
<br>honest discussion of what GNU/Linux has/doesn't have to offer in the same<br>area.</blockquote><div><br>I had the opportunity to run Windows Vista RC1 on my IBM Thinkpad T41p back in October. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the final build. The installations was incredibly easy compared to my past experience of installing Windows. Admittedly I was installing it as a single-boot OS, but I think that is probably the norm, rather than the exception [1]. Unfortunately, I cannot remember clearly, but I think my wireless did not work out of the box. I had to add the device myself and I had to know that I had an Atheros 5212 chipset. Boot up was very quick, and I did not witness any of the long boot times that others have [2].
<br><br>One of the first things I noted was that Windows Vista now comes with an e-mail program, simply called Mail, and it does not seem to be Outlook Express. The UI is relatively simplistic, though not necessarily simple to use. It seems like it is intended to be a clone of the Mail program in Mac OS X. Unfortunately, the performance of their mail program was horrible, and I was unable to use it for very long to manage my IMAP mail account. The filters did not work, and the Junk mail filtering was not very accurate at all.
<br><br>I had already seen IE 7 before I installed Vista, so it was no surprise to me that the new spartan look was just annoying. Though I think the goal was to make the UI more simple, it only served to make it more cryptic. I could figure out where things like your favorites are easily enough, but I anticipate that others will have a real difficulty adjusting. I wonder if Microsoft did any usability testing on this at all. Ironically, IE7 could not render some of the Microsoft Web pages, so I had to download Firefox to see them. I checked out the anti-phishing feature, by clicking on a link in an e-mail that I knew was a phishing scam and it indeed blocked the site.
<br> </div>I played around with some of the gadgets, and they are pretty neat. You can choose to either have them always visible or hide them until you mouse over that way. However, the space in which to add gadgets is rather limited. I think if your gadgets reach the bottom of the screen you need to scroll to see the gadgets below. I added an RSS feed gadget and really struggled to find out how to change or add new RSS feeds. The default feed is a Microsoft one that I was not particularly interested in. I can't remember how easy it was to get new gadgets. :-/
<br><br>The power management was excellent, and I could not make it fail by closing and opening the laptop lid rapidly or removing peripherals while it was sleeping. The one complaint I no have is that the power button in the Windows menu (detailed below) is actually a sleep (suspend-to-ram) button [3], but there is not warning of this. If you didn't know that the little moon light on your laptop meant that you were suspended and not shutdown then you could easily leave your laptop in your bag like that for the weekend and have it run out of battery. However, they may have mimicked the Mac behavior of hibernating (suspend-to-disk) after so much time in sleep.
<br><br>The new Windows menu particularly interesting to me [4]. In my experience, menus are confusing to many people, and apparently many people complained that the menus in Windows XP took up too much screen real estate. The solution that Microsoft came up with was to have one pane where the menus would appear. The default view has the recently used applications and pin board Windows users are used to from the XP menu. If you click on "Programs" everything shifts and now all you see is the programs menu. If you choose a submenu off that, everything shifts again, and all you see is that submenu's content. Seems reasonable, right? However, how do you get back? In addition, this does nothing to help you find an application if you don't know what submenu to look under. The only problem this solves is that it takes up less screen real estate. I asked a Microsoft product manager about this, and his response was that the menu did not do well in usability testing, but they went with it anyway. :-/
<br><br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Personally, I haven't used it yet but our IT manager has and he likes some of
<br>the features (esp. to do with notification of certain event log events). My<br>immediate thoughts when hearing about these features was "Linux/MacOS has had<br>that, like, forever!" but I resisted voicing this because, well, for one:
<br>it's rather childish(!), and two: he's heard me say all that before! My inner<br>Windows "power-user" would ask "how accessible are those features in<br>Linux?", "How can I get them working?", etc.
</blockquote><div><br>That is exactly my thought. Though the log files are there, but how easy are they for the average user to find. I don't really have much experience with this from Vista.<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Just a thought to get some Vista discussion on a constructive track.</blockquote><div><br>An excellent idea, and always necessary to avoid the perception that Linux users are nothing but whingeing, elitist geeks. Thanks for bringing us back to reality. :-)
<br><br>- Pete<br><br><br><br>[1] For an interesting read on Windows Vista vs. Linux and dual booting see the article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at <a href="http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT9727687530.html">http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT9727687530.html
</a><br></div>[2] I saw a reference yesterday that first time bootup took roughly 25 mins, but I cannot find the reference now.<br></div>[3] There is a really good article I read by Joel Spolsky at Wind River Systems on the new Vista shutdown menu at
<a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html</a><br>[4] I hope soon to have a blog entry on why this is particularly interesting to me, but it is not yet finished.
<br><br>-- <br>Pete Goodall <<a href="mailto:pete@yellowhouse.org">pete@yellowhouse.org</a>>