Vista isn’t all that bad, honest
I’ve been using Vista for the last 6 months. This wasn’t really my choice but was kind of forced on me through various issues around licensing and costs. It’s a bit like being forced to use a fork to drink soup when you asked for a spoon. I’m also one of these evil people who use Parallels to run alternative operating systems on my Mac (there is palpable disgust on the faces of Mac fans who catch a glimpse of Windows running on my Mac). But no matter. I don’t like Vista, not one bit but it allows me to use things that aren’t available to the Mac OS. I’m in the same boat as the millions of other people who are considering upgrading from Vista to XP for a nominal 20 quid fee. Nothing seems to be where it should be. Of course this could be down to the fact that I am fairly familiar with Windows 98, XP and the other grayscale operating systems adorning the 1.5 billion computers on the planet. I’m not going to write a review of Vista or continue the Vista-bashing that is so popular on the Internet recently. I do, however, want to briefly discuss some of the positive aspects of Vista. Because I’ve felt myself slowly warming to it. I use notepad for notes (shock) and calculator to do sums. The calculator is so difficult to find on Vista that I have started to actually use the one on my phone instead. This sounds like a stupid thing to do but hear me out. To get the calculator up I click Start > All Programs > Accessories > Calculator – that’s 4 clicks. Admittedly, it’s roughly the same on XP but it take me about the same amount of small movements to pull it up on my phone. On a Mac it’s just a light and friendly squeeze of the mouse and it’s there, it’s actually a pleasure. And of course, when you use the calculator on Vista a couple of times it stays in your frequent applications so you can get to it quicker. However, rather than helping you, this just requires you to think slightly harder when it eventually falls out of frequent use and you have to go and find it buried under a mount of clicks (ok 4 but to me a click is a chip at the coalface). Then I discovered Search, and my life suddenly got ever so slightly better. I type in Calculator and guess what appears!? A paperclip pops up saying ‘It looks like you’re trying to do maths’? No, a calculator appears. The calculator example isn’t great, so what about finding a folder on a network? Well, that used to be easy because I could add places on the network to my favourites. I have no idea how you do this in Vista and I dread having to go to the file server and find something in our huge structure of files because I have to click about a million folder and actually scan lists and lists of projects I know nothing about. But now, I can use this ultra-fast search thing where I just type in what I need and it appears there. And it actually works. It’s ultra-fast because all of the contents of the drive are indexed without my permission, you had to tell XP to index things because it didn’t by default. There’s a similar thing on Macs which works just as well. It’s like Google but for your desktop. Which I think actually already exists. Anyway, all I want to say is, if you have Vista and you don’t have the opportunity to change it, give the Search functionality a go and see how you feel. It’s only one button press away - press your start button and the cursor is already there at the search box. If your blood pressure drops and you start to feel sane again that’s great, if you’re still tearing your hair out, get a Mac.
One of the fundamental rules of usability is to stick to what people know and is familiar to them. In XP, Microsoft made an operating system that people hated but grew to love simply through it’s ubiquity. Vista’s learning curve is a productivity drag and is therefore rejected by most people. Using the idea that you can treat your desktop like the Internet and search it like it’s the Internet really works but only as long as people actually know they can do this. Give it a go.
I’ve been using Vista (Business) for a couple of months and I’m fairly happy with it overall, except I don’t think that it’s necessarily better than WinXP. The integrated search is great, but hardly a must-have selling point. Not to mention that in order for it to work well, the system is constantly being indexed, which is increasing wear on the hard drive, and causes random slowdowns. I’ve installed SP1 as well, and this hasn’t changed (in fact I think it has gotten worse).
There’s a number of good and bad points with the OS. I think that in a nutshell the major pro is that under the hood, it has a lot of nice new features for everyone, but the major pro is the interface: I personally don’t find it aesthetically pleasing at all, and the general experience is often worse, not better, than XP.
Look at the basic explorer window: Good: The new address bar is pretty cool - you can click any directory in the path to go directly there, and even better, you can click outside the address space and it automatically transforms into a text path which you can copy if necessary. Bad: You have a lot of clutter and pointless edging. The transparency effect is fine, but the glow on the window title looks really ugly. Good: You have a much larger number of sorting, arranging and grouping options now available to you. Bad: The sorting/grouping isn’t intuitive, I can’t really figure out how to get a balance between the two.
That’s just the explorer window which, granted, is probably the most important one. But configuration is worse. There’s lots of unnecessary splitting of general and advanced configuration views, I can’t figure out how to hibernate my laptop anymore, UAC makes the system unusable, there are far too many confirmations and additional buttons and dialogs and screens to go through in order to achieve things. In general the window manager is quick and responsive, but I don’t know whether this is due to my having a much more powerful processor and video card in there than my old laptop (which ran XP). Wireless network configuration is a confusing mess. Gadgets are nice but there’s no universal keystroke to activate them, plus the gadgets you can download from Microsoft are crap.
There’s probably more… I agree on the fundamental rules thing, but I think there are even more basic problems. Overall I guess most people are asking whether Vista presents good and enough features to warrant an upgrade… I think the majority of people would agree that this is a firm “No”.
Vista = Italian for VIEW (as in room with a..)
So yes, I like the nice VIEWs that come standard with Vista, relaxing sea scapes, beautiful reflections but is that enough? I could still personalise my desktop with nice VIEWS under XP.
My VIEW is that since I’ve started using Vista my productivity has dropped about 60%. It took me an entire morning last week to rustle up 6 graphs that would have taken me about 20 minutes. Arguably the lack of familiarity with the interface was the main cause but MS could sure do with some lessons from APPLE or NOKIA in understanding user journeys. I might now have pretty illustrations and a myriad of drop down boxes to choose from but is this at the expense of a clearly mapped journey of stages. It just feels like gratuitous and overwhelming choice by pictures where nice small neat buttons worked perfectly well before.
Inevitably I’ll get used to it and several months down the line will no longer be scratching my head and puzzling over where they’ve hidden x or y function , and maybe by SP2 I’ll even be able to rearrange my frequently used menu options to whereever I like, just like the more widget based approach of the new BBC home page (beta) but for now the VIEW is mostly grey and overcast.