09.13.07
Windows Vista
So I’ve been using Vista on my new development machine for a couple of days, after spending the entire weekend getting it set up (ugh). Here are the good things about it so far:
- Breadcrumbs – In explorer, it shows that you’re in “c:\Xxx\Yyy\Zzz” as before, but if you click on “Xxx” it switches to that directory. You can also switch between directories by clicking between them. Overall: Excellent.
- Search ‘as you type’ – just like find in firefox, where there’s a little bar at the top of the explorer window and it filters the list of files as you type into it. Wonderful.
- Start menu keyboard support – hit the windows key and type the first few letters of a program name, and that program runs. It’s like Windows+R on steroids.
- When you hit F2 to rename a file, it selects the filename but NOT the file extension. Oh, this is so nice.
- Windows Aero is very pretty, and the start menu looks nicer.
- The new volume control (with a separate control for each application!) is awesome, and the new clock is very pretty. You can also set up multiple clocks to appear, for different time zones etc.
Bad things so far:
- iTunes bluescreens my machine when I try to import my song library. Waah!
- Apparently I can’t use my geforce 5500 as a secondary graphics card now? It also bluescreened my machine when I tried it.
- Visual studio 2005 doesn’t install properly and needs a patch to work, and complains when you run it. Get with the program, microsoft – can’t you get your flagship IDE working properly on your new OS?
- User Access Control (or whatever it’s called) is annoying sometimes – why should I have to press “continue” 4 times when creating a folder and renaming it? Stupid.
So some good, some bad. However, almost all the good things… those aren’t really “woah we need a new operating system for this!” features. They could easily have been added to windows XP.
The jury’s still out… hopefully service pack 1 will improve things.