Well, we ended up with Vista at the office because Dell wouldn’t ship the specific machine we wanted without it. Out of the box, it was complaining that the audio driver Dell installed wasn’t compatible with Vista.
Meanwhile, I have this to say: if you are a developer or power user, you are going to hate Vista’s interface.
And I’m not talking the “Cancel or Allow” dialog that appears for every program you’re installing. No, I’m talking about the explorer.
It’s pretty, yes. However, usable is another thing. You know the trick, Start / Run… C:\ return?
Did that, up popped a window which showed half a dozen files, and no directories. Seems that Microsoft is now filtering the display of directories from the file listing by default.
Now, given that we had a directory that had directories, navigating became even more problematic when we entered the path because it looked like the directory was empty, when it wasn’t.
Instead of using backslashes in the address bar, you get drop down windows. That’s clever… until you try and actually use it. We found in the bottom left a “thing” labeled folders, and when we clicked it, it gave an explorer-like view of the hierarchy. At that point we had our directory name on the screen several times, but trying to figure out how to delete it became even more annoying.
We had, and I’m not making this up, three Windows experts of 20+ years in the room, and we were all trying to figure out where trivial operations had gone. Frustration levels went through the roof. From what we can tell there’s no good reason why stuff changed — it just did. It’s certainly not more usable. It’s far from intuitive. Basic navigation has become a game of hide’n’seek.
At the moment we’re flipping everything back to acting as Classic Mode as physically possible, but we keep bumping into the stupidest of things.
Vista may look very Mac-like, but it certainly doesn’t behave very Mac like.
I honestly thought my first impressions were going to hold prejudice to performance issues. No, one thing is for sure, this system is going to frustrate a lot of people.
First impression: Vista sucks the joy out of getting a new computer.
Normally I’d give Vista a thumbs down, but I want to give it a reasonable amount of time to change my mind. Adopting to any new operating system can be frustrating the first few hours. Except I don’t recall this with OS X.
UPDATE: There’s another trick you can normally do by default, and that’s open a command prompt window and drag a file in — Windows will instant expand the full pathname to the file; this is a great shortcut. It doesn’t work in Vista by default. But that’s ok, because you can highlight the full path from the address bar and cut’n’paste that into a command window. Oh wait, there is no path now, just drop downs, so you can’t just select with the mouse and Control-C / move to new window / Control-V. Not making me happy….
UPDATE: Some progress, we’ve been disabling security managers, getting lucky about more classic mode settings, and somehow, we don’t know how, got folders displaying in directory listings. It’s getting closer to usable. Tension dropping… that’s a good sign. Hate the new start menu, btw.
UPDATE: Argh, new problem: a print driver doesn’t exist for our corporate printer. We can’t print using Vista.
UPDATE: When installing Vista on a laptop, the touch pad was too sensitive (no way to change it until Vista installed) and an accidental double-tap proceeded forward in the installation wizard, but there was no back button. Not happy.
UPDATE: New problem surfaced – when Vista goes to sleep, it never wakes up. Pressing a key or wiggling the mouse doesn’t bring it back to life. Oddly enough, the computer is powered on, and drive bays open and close. Have to hold in the power button for seven seconds, but that reboots. We’ve lost a lot of work this way. Time to munge the power management settings.
MEANWHILE: Dell announces a new quad-dual-core machine, but states that it doesn’t work with Vista. What’s up with that?
UPDATE: We’ve finally had enough, we’re buying an external copy of XP, and are planning on blowing Vista away. As things stand today, a little more than after a month after this post was first written, I don’t see how anyone would want to use this. Pretty, yes. Pretty annoying, also yes.
UPDATE: Remember the disk defragmenter? Well, now there’s no visual status, it all happens in the background. You can’t tell how far along it is, how badly your drive is fragmented, nor how much better it has made things.