Well, I got my hands on Windows Vista for the first time today and it’s the Ultimate (fat cat) edition at £340 - Retail, £223 - Upgrade and £123 - OEM which includes the full array of features that Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to restrict in other versions, seemingly making the descision of what we do in our homes and ofices for us. Nice one Microsoft.
So I boot it up and I have to say the initial set up is a lot less complicated than in previous versions which seems nice. All I had to do was confirm time zones, keyboard layout and system locale and tell it the name of the initial user. Easy. Then came an unsettlingly long wait while “Windows detected my computer’s performance” The machine is a Dual core 2.66Ghz machine with a, not small, 2GB of RAM as well as a, not too shabby, ATI graphics card. Vista gave it a performance score of 4.2. I have yet to see if that’s good or not as it gives you no sort of benchmark. You’d think however that this was more than enough clout to power through the post-install setup of an OS.
When I finally got to the desktop I was pleasently surprised by how little the new glass effect GUI bothered me. I thought it would distract me far too much from the tasks I was attempting to do. Another nice feature is how you can quickly and easily set the size of things like icons to give people with poor eyesight the benefit of large icons and text without the disadvantages of taking your nice new TFT screen away from it’s native resolution. However, it was when I first started playing with these settings I discovered the biggest annoyance so far; Windows’ paranoia. You change a setting, windows asks you permission. You run a program (that hasn’t been made by Microsoft) and it asks you permission. Heaven forbid you should start an application that accesses the network or the Internet, because if you do that you are bombarded with fear mongering messages of how hackers might damage your PC or your data or how you might be susceptible to viruses or spyware.
I can see what MS is trying to do here and it’s a noble cause. I can only imagine but I would bet that the majority of virus infections on home or small office PCs is a direct result of the user not being aware of what they are doing and clicking on dodgy links etc. How they are dealing with it though concerns me greatly. You would think that Microsoft would want to invite more and more people to feel comfortable using their computers without the worry of online fraud, phishing and spyware. Throwing warnings and messages in their face at every turn telling them how vulnerable they are to such threats just seems like a very quick way of putting off inexperienced users and, to not put too fine a point on it, pissing off the experienced ones. I just think they should have spent more time making the OS intelligent against such threats so it could handle it’s business behind the scenes and not continually bother the user by asking for permission for every program to run.
Now, I have managed to turn off the UAC (User Account Control) feature that asks for your permission each time you change a setting and this has stopped a lot of the annoying messages, however I did have to delve quite deep into the control panel to access this control and for inexperienced users this could well be too taxing. I can only hope that over the next few days of using Vista it does learn my habits and pick up on what is and isn’t a threat and stop bugging me so much.
Vista has been sold as the best, most user friendly Windows experience to date and in many ways this is true. The eye-pleasing new GUI and more intuative ways of carrying out common tasks such as live previews on alt+tab and the, oh-so-swanky, flip3D and sidebar make your day to day operations seem more pleasurable but, for me anyway, these are overshadowed by this overwhelming paranoia. It does it’s job of protecting the user from him/herself but I think it could do it in a much less annoying way. For example one of the first tests I carried out on the PC was installing a piece of bespoke software to see if it would install and run correctly on vista. One of the stipulations of the install is that the config.nt file in system 32 had to be edited. Opening the file for editing was fine, nice and easy but when I went to save it I was hit over and over again with a message saying “cannot create C:\windows\system32\config.nt check file name and path….” Althoguh it told me nothing of the sort, this was another one of Vista’s new idiosyncrasies at work. In the end I had to save a copy to the desk top and then, using explorer move the file into system32 and overwrite the original. You can imagine what windows said to me when I suggested this move! “Don’t do that, it’s dangerous!” and “I need your permission to do that!” It all just seems silly to me.
While on the subject of security, Microsoft have made domain logon more secure but in my oppinion they’ve butchered it in the process. The interface is ugly and it all seems a bit like an afterthought. Where previous versions had a nice tidy window with “Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to logon” and an option to find out more about this, Vista just has some nasty jagged text in the middle of a splash screen saying it. When you get past this screen you are presented with your account avatar and a password box. If you want to change user you need to, first click “Switch User” then if you want that user to be on a domain other than the local machine you now need to type “domain/username” seems a little rushed. But thats just my opinion.
I have yet to see what neurological disorder MS Office 2007 is afflicted with. Bets on Tourette’s Syndrome anyone?
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August 6th, 2008 || 
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