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« on: October 07, 2008, 01:47 PM »
Thanks for the write-up. I'd also done a 1 month Vista SP1 (32bit) immersion on a Dell workstation over the summer, and ended up preferring it to XP overall.
I like the new explorer, and though the view controls are pretty strange from an XP user point-of-view, I got to like them. I refused to install FARR to see how the Start menu could work (as I'd done in Leopard with Quicksilver). FARR was missed throughout, I found the experience pretty poor, but as a launcher it is better than nothing (i.e. XP functionality). Spoilt by Spotlight, I had high expectations for unobtrusive content searching from the start menu, but even after forcibly enabling content indexing, the experience was poor and unreliable. That is really a shame, and something I hope is substantially improved for Win 7. More metadata, robust search and extensibility is my wanted features on this.
Performance was adequate (NVidia 8600GT), though Word 2007+Vista can feel like running in snow sometimes. I would get freezes every so often too, but I never could track it down with process explorer. XP, Ubuntu and Leopard all felt faster on the same machine though in "smoothness". And start times of Vista were slower than the others (shutdown was faster than XP though). Sleeping the machine was much more reliable than under XP. As everyone and their dog has commented, Vista demands good hardware. Having used two different "economy" laptops (1GB RAM) with Vista home of friends, the experience is miserably poor. But the Dell workstation was well specced enough overall.
The lack of attention to detail in Aero is consistent with MS's inconsistency on UI polish. As an example, the window border has a cyan "highlight" on the right+bottom edge, as if incident light is reflected within the "glass". But the cyan colour never changed when the UI colours did (reflected light would be filtered by the glass it passed through in reality), breaking the sense of realistic modeling. Having this bright cyan pixel border of an red-tinted glass is just sloppy. It would be trivial to modify it based on the UI colours. There are several "fit-and-finish" bits like this, but it's hardly a major issue...
I *love* the new fonts, beautifully designed, though limited in unicode extent (hopefully they will grow) and sometimes I saw really poor kerning. I'm not sure if that was Windows poor font handling or specific to the new fonts. Vista's font management is still poor. Nevertheless, the fonts themselves are on all of my machines (as they come with MS Office for PC and Mac), and I use Consolas as my monospaced font of choice for programming everywhere. :-*
In the end though, as one uses Vista one keeps finding the old XP dialogs "under-the-skin", so it really feels like a modified XP over time. I think continuity is good, but some preferences dialogs could desperately do with a clean-sweep design and it feels a bit pick-and-mix design-wise.
UAC *did* intensely annoy me after a couple of weeks. At first I appreciated the security. But over time you do end up just clicking to get rid of it. And working round it in my Matlab programming was annoying as hell. I turned it off after 3 weeks.
Never heard of Zepto, but it looks a nice laptop. Is the soft touch like on the old thinkpads?