Redeeming creation one byte at a time
My take on Vista
Since today is the official birthday of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s newest OS I thought I might take a minute and share my opinion.
In a nutshell, it’ll be a while before our shop goes to it. I’ve been running it for about a month now and I’ve been underwhelmed (have I said that? I distinctly remember saying that…). For a business customer, there are some signficant issues with the interface. Also, it greatly dissapoints me knowing what was not in Vista and yet it still took them like 5 years to get the thing out of the door.
After a growing look at the OS, the best and worst thing it has going for it is that it changes the interface signficantly. Paradigms are shifted as well in that some commonalities to previous versions of Windows are now gone. Chief among them is the idea of drives. Your C drive and all network drives a bit more hidden in the interface, and I’ve still yet to find a way to map a drive efficently (maybe I’m missing it?). Run is missing as well, which really irks me.
I’ve been going through a number of programs that are not uncommon to a normal user and there are a number of issues that I’ve been running into in getting them to work. One such example is iTunes/iPod; when an iPod is plugged into the system, it initially wants to scan it for errors and, in my experience, caused some disk issues on the iPod itself. iTunes has been a bit more cagey than it normally is.
Then there’s the issue of missing components. I’ve been waiting for the update to NTFS, a 10 year old file system, for a while and from the sound of it, the planned FS that was going into Vista was going to be great, but they just simply didn’t have time. I trust that much of what they did have time for was security issues.
Overall, as I’ve said before, it’s pretty and cool looking. The worst part about this release is that there are stable, viable alternatives out there (including Windows XP) that do the job better than Vista. Steve Balmer said in an interview last night that they plan to have 200 Million copies of Vista in production this year; we’ll see.
To me, it reminds me somewhat of Windows ME only with the NT Codebase. I can only hope I’m wrong…
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. Vista is the next ME. Which is sad, really, really, sad.
The only plus side I have seen for Vista is the security upgrades M$ made. The new security features are well outlined in the January 2007 issue of MaximumPC. And make me think that Vista is great for the Grandma and Grandpa.
But only if it comes with a new PC. This is a caveat to anyone thinking of going to Vista: I would never spend the money to move from Windows XP to Vista. It is most certainly a waste. Wait to see what M$ comes out with after Vista, and hope you can skip Vista all together.