August 2, 2007
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windows vista
For the first time I’ve gotten a chance to play around with windows vista for a significant amount of time. I’m using the Home Premium edition and I am using it to type this blog entry right now.
Overall, I don’t dislike it. It doesn’t seem to have the huge improvements over the previous version that windows xp had over ME, but then that would be pretty unlikely since windows XP is a fine OS that I’ve never had any problems with whereas ME you couldn’t pay me to use.
I was actually surprised by the number of UI changes that I quite like. There are a lot of concepts that I have seen on other OSes that seem to be incorporated. The start menu is a lot less annoying now. I still prefer multiple menus across the top rather than jamming everything together into one button at the bottom, but the start is fine and the organization is clean. I like the translucent windows, the directory structure is much more sane than the old one. And I am ecstatic that they finally made it so that running software does not default to administrative privileges. The best thing though is the new address bar in explorer. It’s just really cool and very efficient for moving around through directories and I haven’t seen anything quite exactly like it before. I love it.
There are lots of little other improvements I like. From the order in which menus are displayed, to the integration of search into everywhere, to the new control panel, to the lack of annoying advertisements in the left hand sidebars. Generally everything just seems a little bit better here and there making a better overall experience. I am much more impressed than I thought I would be at least as far as the user interface goes. One might argue whether small cosmetic changes to appearance, however well conceived, are worth buying a brand new OS for. Or if the difficulty in needing to relearn how one interacts with one’s computer will cause more problems than the improvements solve. But you can’t argue that the interface did not improve. It’s definitely better now.
But there’s one thing about this new OS that bothers me a great deal. It’s a little slow. Not slow in an intolerable way, but slow enough to be annoyingly noticeable. I am running the OS on a brand new laptop, albeit a pretty low end one compared to what’s out there these days, but its still a dual-core processor with a gig of ddr2 ram which makes it considerably faster than my desktop. It is a laptop so I don’t know maybe it has a really bad motherboard or something, but I doubt it.
You see the interesting thing is that its slow but it is slow in a weird way. Start up and shutdown both go fast. What’s more individual apps don’t run slow at all. Their internal menus are all quite responsive and it all works pretty smoothly. Any particular program I am interacting with I can’t tell the difference. Even running multiple programs at once, the programs themselves seem to run pretty fast and don’t seem to slow each other up substantially.
What is slow is the windowing interaction. If I have multiple programs up and try switching between one to another there is a delay. If I resize a window or move a window there is a delay. The more windows the more noticeable the effect. Also, sometimes when I click on a new executable that I have not run before there is a considerable delay before the application or installer begins. Sometimes it lasts as long as a minute before the OS pops a box that asks me if it is ok to run the program. After that box pops then it runs fast but the delay until that point is pretty annoying.
Perhaps I am just spoiled, back when XP started I had to turn off all of the eye candy and fluff in order to interact with the system smoothly. Since then, many upgrades and new computers later now I run XP with all of the features enabled and don’t notice any slowdown at all, and likewise I don’t notice any issues when running either kde or gnome without adjustment. But now Vista apparently is a little more intensive so I guess I’m going to have to learn to turn some stuff off again. But first I’ll try upgrading the RAM and see if it helps.
Anyway, I like Vista well enough, but I still wouldn’t pay for it if it didn’t come with the computer I was buying and I don’t intend to upgrade any of my other computers any time soon if ever. Still, it is always fascinating to watch how each OS strives to outdo the last.
