I just realized that its been just over a month that I’ve been running the RTM version of Vista and Office 2007 on my MacBook and it seemed like a good opportunity to think about the product. For calibration purposes my MacBook is a 2.0ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, putting it fairly high on the CPU/RAM spectrum. The graphics are just the Intel integrated graphics (I think its the 945GM chip), and as I mentioned this is a MacBook running Bootcamp mostly so its native on the hardware, but with a slightly sketchy driver/BIOS situation since Bootcamp isn’t officially released yet and doesn’t unofficially support Vista. For both Vista and Office I’m using the Ultimate versions.
The overview of my experience is “eh”. Overall so far there is almost nothing in Vista that I hate (once I disabled the User Account Control (UAC) security nonsense). The performance of the machine is fine, the UI feels fresh compared to XP, and Office has been a fine place to do all the usual Office stuff- writing documents, sending email, etc (although I’ll admit that independently I’ve been using Google Docs for that stuff more and more lately). The easiest way to wrap up my overall experience is that I’ve got no intention to pull Vista off this machine, but despite having a couple of fresh Vista boxes sitting on a shelf at home I’m in no hurry to upgrade any of my other machines. I should also mention that I’ve made no effort to systematically explore the entire feature set of this huge new OS and Office package- part of the point of this write-up is that I’m experiencing it as a (not-so normal) consumer and sharing my reactions with what I happen to encounter.
Things I Like
Windows Calendar.
The Windows Calendar works great with CalendarData and seems like a solid companion to Outlook Express (now known as Windows Mail), bring a nice calendar client to all Windows users. I wish the publish to web-site features had a better flow (it really only works with a WebDAV server set up as a file share, its hard to get it to work with a site like CalendarData), but especially given how late an addition this was to the product, it is really well done.
Aero Glass. Some people complain that its distracting, but on the balance I like it- as we hoped when designing it, it is fresh, light and doesn’t get in your way. I remember that we were really concerned about getting reasonable performance on machines like this MacBook with integrated GPUs, but it works great so far on at least the modern integrated GPUs, so that is a pleasant surprise
Hibernate seems much faster which is a surprisingly important improvement. I’m curious if the hybrid flash-harddrives will make this even better.
And the new games are kind of cool. I like the Hold-Em poker, and InkBall.
Things I don’t like
This is not really Microsoft’s fault, but the number of apps that have subtle compatibility problems is annoying. Firefox and Adobe Reader are two top examples that have been annoying. Firefox had some strange bug where it wouldn’t load some sites on Vista and Adobe’s installer was broken- I haven’t had a chance to check if these were fixed yet. It also took a month for Microsoft to ship the Visual Studio update that is supposed to work on Vista, although I was running the one that “doesn’t work” and never noticed whatever the issues were.
Windows Live Messenger doesn’t seem to work 100% right, which IS Microsoft’s fault. On my Vista machine it continuously logs in and out if I was logged in on another machine. I have no idea what the problem is and it is not necessarily related to Vista, but since this is the only box where it happens…
The start menu- I’m still not really used to it. Sometimes it seems faster since I can just hit [windows] and type something like “cmd”, but often it feels very awkward to navigate. It feels like they were headed in the right direction but just never got the usability right. This problem is made much worse by some horrendous performance problems- the initial Window pop-up is always very fast but when you navigate to a folder there is often an unacceptable multi-second delay. Also the highlighting of the current item in the start menu as you mouse or keyboard navigate is way too subtle and it is hard to see on some screens / lighting conditions.
The organization of the control panels are still very confusing. It feels like someone started to organize a few into a new taxonomy but left a bunch out so there is some weird combination of things being in old places, things being in new places, and overall its very hard to find the setting that I want.
Office
Did I mention Office? I’ve been running the new Office too. I’m completely ambivalent about the new Office, but I’ve also got to admit that my need for hard-core Office features is probably quite a bit lower in my current role. I use Outlook, Word and Excel, all in fairly lightweight ways. I’ve been lucky enough to not have to make any slide-decks lately. The new ribbon UI is fine and I mostly didn’t have a hard time finding stuff in Word. Outlook’s UI doesn’t fit in with the rest of Office- its actually inconsistent within itself. The main window is classic menu bar, but when you open an email to read it, its with a ribbon. But the only thing that I really hate is that the next/previous buttons (the ones that are the most important of all when reading through your mailbox) have moved off into a weird spot in the top left of the window and are tiny compared to other nice huge buttons in the ribbon.
Bottom Line
These are all fine products, and are actually reasonable releases if you manage to ignore the “wow” marketing campaign or painful 5+ years it took to build them. I’m going to try to hold off buying any new computers until this summer with the new 45nm processors come out, but when they do I’ll happily run Vista on those machines. I’ll probably even eventually upgrade a few of my other machines once there has been enough time that I’m confident all the key software I need runs on them (games + some wacky airplane data download stuff). To be honest, I’ve actually come around and I think its probably a good idea for Microsoft to do Windows releases that are more incremental like this. If upgrades weren’t so expensive, it would be great to have a nice refresh every two years that just feels a little fresh and has great support for the latest hardware.
