Tuesday, November 28, 2006

My two cents on Vista ...

I've been playing with Vista the past few weeks since it was released to manufacturers... There are a lot of quirky things to it.

What I found to be the funniest yet, has been the way Microsoft dealt with some of their new folder arrangements. User profiles are no longer stored under "C:\Documents and Settings\" now they are under "C:\users" - so in a desperate attempt to work with poorly written older applications Microsoft places a hidden shortcut named "C:\Documents and Settings" that basically points to "C:\users" ...

There are quite a few of these hidden shortcuts all over the place which basically tell me that for a while there will be this 'patchy' arrangement where holes are covered up with shortcuts to the new os defined paths... Hopefully what I said made sense...

Usually if a driver installs services (like my lexmark printer for example) you have a pretty small chance it will work on vista.. There are also annoying things like hardware incompatibility issues that still occasionally cause blue screens for that classic Microsoft moment...

I found it most frustrating that installing Visual Studio 2005 does not work very well. You have to go out of your way and apply a work-around to get the desired compatibility.. All the compatibility issues are understandable, but still pretty frustrating until new software is released with vista in mind..

There are a lot of features really that I found pretty cool to have built in, but at the end of the day - you're paying for a more reliable and secure operating system with a rich UI..

I hate to say mac did just that a few years ago.. Maybe I haven't compared it well enough yet - but overall thats what I got out of it so far. For windows people its a great improvement. But mac users kinda had this already...

1 comment:

SunShine said...

U had vista in 2006, I saw it first in 2008. Technology sure does travel slow to Kenya, with its frustrations. It seemed cool tho, every new thing usually does. Now Im back on Window XP, sometimes Win 07