The Vista Experience: Confusion written 5 years ago

Microsoft released Vista Beta 2 earlier this week, so I headed over and proceeded to download the ~3 GB ISO. I was terribly impressed by the massive bandwidth bill Microsoft must be facing — it downloaded at lightning speed, and has apparently become one of the largest download events on the internet.

Installation went well enough, but it was becoming clear that my machine wasn’t entirely happy with the “Vista Experience”. The smoothly shimmering auras that some designer had envisaged, were more of a flickering spark of a bad idea.

Aside from the obvious lack of power coming from the computer, what were my first impressions?

• Glass interface. Something that has been a talking point of Vista, from its inception is the pretty glass interface. I’ve got to say it’s quite nice, and once I managed to get the window borders down to something sensible, it became all the more bearable.

Microsoft Developer #23415

I know … let’s add 5px onto every window, so that we’re sure to show off our fancy glass effects.

• Media Center. Admittedly I can’t really test much of MC, since my computer just canne handle it (captain). But from what I can see they’re quite butchered it. MC is probably the only reason I don’t have one of these sat on my desk. Everything seems to have been moved about, into unintuitive locations, and magical effects have been applied that make my graphics card cry.

• User file locations. Finally user files are in a more sensible locations:

  
       C:\\Users\\Rob\\Documents
       C:\\Users\\Rob\\Downloads
       ...
       C:\\Users\\Rob\\Pictures
  
  

  Much better than that C:\\Documents and settings\\Rob\\My - no maybe "Rob's" Documents\\*mess*, and thank god they’ve dropped the “My ” prefix. That got on my tits.

• Explorer Windows. What the heck has gone on here? Explosion in the bad ideas factory? Commendations go for providing many ways to view my data, but by jingo — too many ways, and too much clutter. Would a link to “Computer” be too much to ask for by default?

  One thing that I think is pretty clever is that the search and filtering syntax is quite neat. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t bloody work. Searching is useless, and takes three weeks to turn up anything. The indexing service is still required to have built a database about your files, and I’ve never managed to obtain any worthwhile performance from that. Why something apple-spotlight-like couldn’t have been implemented I don’t know.

  Another curiosity of the searching/filtering is the syntax used in the address bar. It appears to be some kind of GET request type thing.

• Internet Explorer. Everything’s moved. I can’t find a bloody thing. I can’t customise it either. Why does it keep asking me if I want to work offline? Firefox it is.

This is taking far too long to whinge about, so i’ll just list the other things that I’ve noted:

• No updates to MS Paint / Windows Mail (Outlook Express) / Notepad. I would have liked an at least half decent program to resize a few pictures with, and perhaps do some editing of files with unix line endings… hum.

• I can’t get FTP folders working.

• The Sidebar is pretty, and the feeds are nice. But it doesn’t seem to be resizable, and the settings on the “gadgets” is lacking — for instance I can’t change the directory of the slideshow folder.

• The whole User-Admin-Security thing. Its meant to grey out the screen, but instead causes the monitor to black out and switch modes. Very irritating.

• New Games are interesting. They’ve added Mahjong, and re-written the popular classics.

• The Network Centre confuses me.

• The help centre isn’t bad. What is bad is that i’ve had to make too much use of it.

• Control Panel is irritating. Will this link open in a daughter window? will it change the current window? Why doesn’t the search turn up useful things?

So in conclusion, I’m not enjoying Beta 2, and before I return to try Vista again, it’d better be on a machine with a lot more grunt. Poor old AMD XP2400+ just can’t handle it.

Although many of the items I’ve mentioned above are clearly bugs, and will probably be ironed out come release date, the crucial issue for me was that I got lost trying to achieve tasks which I could do in my sleep in XP. If I’ve got to learn a whole new way of doing things, why not get a new OS?

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