Originally posted by: ScottSwingleComputers
I got it loaded last night. Athlon 64 3500 with 1 gb of ram. System is rated a 3. I am mostly frusterated by the slowness of the whole thing. What should be simple tasks max out the cpu and take forever to open up. Interestingly enough though, Office 2007 apps load lightning fast. ATI drivers loaded great, haven't gotten Creative drivers loaded though. I tried the Vista beta 1 drivers, but I still dont have any sound. Maybe because I'm running 64 bit?
Nero version 6 installed ok. I got a message when launching the install that there was a known problem with nero and vista, but I told it to install anyways. I haven't burned with Nero itself, but I have burned 2 discs with DVD Shrink, which uses Nero, so I dont expect any problems with that.
As far as user interface, I do like it for the most part. I am getting frusterated at not being able to find settings that I need though. On the other hand, the search is awesome. Open up the control panel and type in the search what you want to do, and it finds you the correct control panel app. Now if only I knew how to get to that setting without searching every time... Even going to windows help and getting a step by step walkthrough (when trying to find autoplay settings) told me to go the control panel and search for autoplay.
The sidebar, while cool, seems mostly useless. I have a cpu meter, an analog clock, and the slideshow thingy. While from a technology aspect its cool to be able to do that, do I really need an analog clock there? And the picture slideshow...I haven't figured out how to change the folder to someplace I actually have pics that I would like to see. I dont really want to duplicate my pics into the folder it works out of just to use the slideshow.
I'm sure it'll all grow on me, and I'm going to attempt to use it as much as possible and not boot back to XP, but it has a lot of room to improve IMHO.
Help is definitely much improved - I think. I havent really had to use help much for XP, but seems like I'm living in it in vista to try to do a simple thing.
The sidebar is a neat idea, but its already too late. I cant see how its any superior to konfabulator/yahoo widgets, which has been out much longer, and has far many widgets already available. I guess its about time, but nothing to get excited over.
More ranting:
The new explorer is an excercise in frustration. I want to know what brilliant genius decided to get rid of list view in explorer, so I can slap him in the face.
Right now, a few folders have default templates, the rest are all default to details. I really, honestly, do not need to know the date of last modification for every single file - I'd rather have that space for viewing more files. I can use small icons, but its similar as in xp, it goes across rows instead of columns, which is beyond useless. Large icons aren't wide enough to accomodate filenames. Extra large icons are just plain too big. Tiles take up too much space. But I could live without list if I was able to at least conveniently set up folder properties...but something so obvious is just not there. It wasnt there in XP, but it wasnt as big of a deal then - now it is. I wish I could just right click a folder, and have it and all subfolders act a certain way - I can technically, but only if its music, documents or video, and even then, I have to use microsoft's template. If I want to change it, I have to do it for EVERY SINGLE FOLDER across the entire system, or each folder individually....
A few good things. It's easy to put your favorite places on the nav bar in explorer. And the address bar that lets you get to a certain folder level quick is brilliant. But it gets much worse from there. The preview pane is also fairly useless. It takes a while for the preview to come up...might as well have just opened the file, and besides, it's already basically showing you the same thumbnail as the icon. So basically, in order for it to be of any use, it needs to be bigger than your icons. Do that, and you won't have much room for icons left. And best of all, when you resize the explorer window, the preview pane stays the same size, instead of changing size proportionally, so you either have a small useless preview pane, or a large preview pane that blocks out the view of the actual files youre trying to preview unless it's maximized.
And we now come to the most important innovation of all. The "open" button. Just what we needed. I suppose its useful for those who lack the dexterity to double click. Which leads me to yet another obvious irritation - you can't customize any of the buttons/toolbars.
I could keep on going...that new explorer is a wreck...it's got a few good ideas, but overall, they need to go back to the drawing board on a lot of it. I guess they removed list because it didnt gracefully fit in with their little zoom bar, which ironically, does everything but gracefully zoom.
So just like aero glass, MS took something that wasnt broken, and made it pretty and useless.
Windows account protection is an absolute atrocity. I really do not need to have my screen go blank, a fake dialog box pop up, to ask me to do routine stuff because it assumes I'm an idiot. I turned it off, but it would actually be useful on a guest account. But apparently, I must withstand the torture of it in admin mode in order for standard users to be not affected - you can't turn it off by account. Sigh.
None of the new apps are worthwhile.
MP10 is nothing more than a facelift as far as I can tell. Apparently, after all these years, MS still hasnt figured out that if MP is supposed to be remotely useful with large music libraries, we're going to need to drill through our libraries like itunes (genre>artists>album) instead of being greeted with one giant list of genres, artists, or albums. It's such a simple thing, and it's an absolute dealbreaker.
Windows calendar is clunky, contacts is as useless as ever - it opens up in explorer, with half the space wasted on stuff not applicable to it - try and turn it off like the preview pane, and you end up turning it off in explorer itself. Windows mail is the same outlook express as we've always used. IE7 is a worthwhile upgrade, but I've moved on from IE like everyone else here a LONG time ago, and its just plain not as good as FF or Opera.
I could care less about movie maker, and solitaire.
I really hate to say it, cause I was looking forward to it, but at the end of the day, this is going to be nothing more than a visual upgrade at this rate. Unlike Office 2007 however, which is the most brilliant piece of software to come out of MS in years. I heard that they got the director of office 2007 to take over direction of Vista...hopefully some will rub off.