Notes on Vista (part I)
For the most parts I actually like Vista. Sure there’s a transition period from XP but it ain’t too bad, and a lot of the changes seems like they are for the better. Still I may just be to lazy to change things…
Some points of observation:
1) UAC - User Access Control
UAC is every bit as annoying as I imagined it would be. On the possitive side, the number of dialogs quickly decreased to an reasonable amount. However my main issue with UAC is that I still haven’t figured out exactly what it is it is supposed to fix. My guess is, a lot less than could be hoped for… Probably not worth the hazzle. Have I disabled it - no (see lazy part above).
2) ClearType
This to me just makes text look “fuzzy”. It can be disabled (but you have to dig through some menu’s to do so), however the entire Vista UI is based on six new ClearType fonts. Without ClearType enabled, these fonts look pretty awful. So have I been through the entire UI changing fonts to something reasonable - no (again, see lazy part). Besides, Office 2007 has these ClearType fonts hardcoded into it’s UI. You just can’t win. To be fair, I’m now at a point where I think it looks quite good. Does it really look good, or have I just gotten accustomed to crap? Who knows?
3) Start Menu
The new start menu is a huge improvement. I now use almost exclusively the search field to launch just about anything. Want to run Word - press the Windows button on the keyboard, type word and press Enter.
4) Aero
I can’t believe we waited so long for it, and it’s not exactly a revolution, but it does look very cool.