Vista You Sure Are Hard to Love
Vista, you sure are hard to love. I am trying my best, to love you unconditionally - I know you are a beta baby - but you make it very difficult.
I have loaded Beta 2 a couple of times already - but when the going got tough (which was usually pretty early on) I quickly bailed and re-installed XP SP2. This time, in my TechEd 2006, drinking the Kool Aide, hangover stupor, I decided to install it again and try my best to live through the tough times. Here is where I am at:
- Office 2007 Beta 2 works amazingly well with Vista. This is the bright spot in the experience. OneNote, especially, shines. Outlook is a close second. The improvements between the two continue to save me time on a daily basis.
- Performance is hit and miss. I am running it on Dell Latitude D610 2GHz processor with no Aero Glass and 1 GB RAM. With Outlook, OneNote, and an instance of IE open I am consuming the entire gigabyte of RAM. I don’t know of many corporations that have started embracing a standard of 2 GN RAM for their mobile workforce.
- Vista just "goes away." Many times a day (more than I can count) Vista will just "go away" while performing the simplest tasks - browsing a directory, running a program install or inserting a CD in to the CD drive. It will eventually come back - but it seems to only do so when it feels good and ready. I can not find a correlation between events or environment that seem to trigger this. Even when reproducing the same steps that led to this in the first place.
- IE7 is good and bad. I love the new interface. I love the RSS integration. I love the Favorites Center. I hate how long it takes at least 50% of the pages I visit to load. IE will seem to do the same thing the OS does - just decide to grind away for five minutes before the page finally loads. It will do this for pages it previously loaded with no problem as well. I am also prompted to now authenticate to internal web sites that key off of my domain account membership that I never had to when using IE6 under XP. Something has clearly changed there.
- Search is awesome. The search implementation in this beta is far greater than it has been in any previous builds. It is very accurate and very fast. It found every item that I challenged it to look for.
- Vista hates my CDRW\DVD drive. Perhaps it is just a driver issue, but anything I try to do from the drive is a miserable experience. Install a program, access data, browse directories or burn an .iso file. It is all a pain in the butt. Autoplay almost always fails as well. Inserting a CD does nothing.
- WMP is also a performance nightmare. Along the same lines as IE and the OS, WMP will also check out on me. If I do anything other than try to play a simple .mp3, it is, again, painful. URGE has been impossible for me to experience. I cannot even get WMP to behave enough to experience it. I hear it is great.
- The mobility center is an excellent idea. Almost all OEM Laptop manufacturers have something like this developed for their laptops. However, the implementation so far isn't stellar. Many of the features are unavailable - again perhaps due to the beta nature of the OS and the lack of driver support from Dell.
- I thought the Sync Center would be the built-in answer to Good Sync or Sync Toy. However, I cannot get anything other than the default sync to work. Clicking on the link to create a new sync never results in anything.