About a week and a half ago I installed Vista Beta 2 on a second hard drive with the intention of using Vista as my primary OS for a while to see how it goes. I know, I know, for those of you that read this blog regularly you’re probably waiting for a bunch of disasters for me to scream about <g>…
But, surprise, surprise, and no less of my own, I’m pretty happy with my Vista installation. I’m running Vista on my dual core Dell Inspiron 9400 (2Ghz, 2gig, 100 gig, GE Force Go 7800 GTX) and it’s actually working rather well. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by overall performance of Vista which is comparable with XP even in full Aero video mode (although I have some scroll stuttering issues – more on that later).
My primary reason for installing and running on Vista for a while is to get familiar with Vista and more importantly start working with IIS 7. It’s somewhat important to check out compatibility issues of applications especially in regards to configuration and installation issues.
Installation
Installation went very smooth and surprisingly Vista picked up most of my devices without a hitch. The exception was my video card (which is weird because there’s a driver for it) and I originally missed the driver in the driver list. I ran for a few days with a different nVidia driver for the GO 7800 and while it worked fine after boot, it got real cranky after putting the machine to sleep and reactivating it. All scroll operation (scrollbars, scroll wheel especially in Internet Explorer) would go a little then stutter, go and stutter. I later found the right driver and this behavior improved some although I still see it in Internet Explorer.
The good news is that in the time I’ve been running Vista almost everything I’ve thrown at it works well. All of my core applications run and even look decent running under the Vista UI. This includes a host of Visual FoxPro desktop apps as well as a number of local .NET applications. The .NET applications actually fare a little worse here in that there seem to be some slight alignment and sizing problems with various controls, so that some of my custom controls look a little odd, but that’s probably do to my inept work with WinForms custom controls <g>…
Aero UI
I will say that that all applications short of Office look real ugly under Vista. The Vista color schemes are all washed out white and there’s no contrast for forms. So menus and menu backgrounds are white on off white with black text on top of it. It’s usable but it’s not pretty to look at. It’s kind of like running the grey theme in XP which results in an all washed out look. Aero doesn’t really do anything for the theming – all it does is provide a transparent border, which looks pleasing, but doesn’t do squat for the actual client area of forms. I’m not sure what this really means for our applications – since the stock Aero schemes don’t seem to change the actual theme that the applications actually see changing the theme has no effect on the client area. Does this mean we’re now expected to pick colors explicitly and run once again with fixed colors?
Aero has a few nice touches that I found including the Task Switch functionality which lets you flip through applications easily and preview view popups for taskbar icons both of which show little preview windows of the running applications. The task switch is also mouse aware so you can click on the icon you want instead of having to tab. Ho hum – I’ve been doing that for years with TaskSwitchXp. Some folks also get excited about the Windows Key Tab Carousel of windows which is kind of fun for a few seconds, but it’s nothing earth shattering.
Beware if you don’t run Aero though. That UI is downright UGLY. Unfortunately I had to switch to this mode a few times because of some issues with my video drivers (I think). The video driver seems to want to stutter when live video is running or other DirectX content is active (like Media Player with Visualizations for example). Also it looks like recovering from sleep mode screws with the video drivers at times (not always) and the stuttering then occurs even if nothing else is stressing the video system. Similar issue with sound – on some occasions sound would die after recovering from sleep. Putting the machine back to sleep then open again would bring it back – most of the time. Ah, it’s beta and I suspect driver support will get better closer to release time.
Synching
I was pleased to see that Vista recognized my SmartPhone immediately on connection and it also recognized my 2nd generation iPod. In fact, I was rather stoked when I saw Media Player recognized the iPod and started synching to it. Unfortunately, the sync doesn’t do jack as WMP doesn’t sync the playlist and file info that the iPod requires. I know this is an Apple issue not WMP, but my machine spent a good hour synching with the iPod before I realized that none of the synched files were accessible. My iPod days are numbered – I’m sick of the proprietary interface that Apple is protecting and even more sick of iTunes. The new Media Player looks much improved and finally feels like a real music player that I might actually want to use… next step is to get a device that works well with it in the 20 gig range to fit all of my music.
The biggest issue I have at this point is with – my SmartPhone. Vista installs Mobile Center which I guess is the replacement for ActiveSync. Vista sees my phone and I can sync files if I choose, however I’ve not been able to sync with Office 12. That’s about the biggest beef I have right now.
Office 12
Speaking of Office 12, I installed that as well. I like the changes to Outlook which feels much smoother and has many usability improvements that make it easier to manage the mountains of information. The enhancements are subtle in many places, but they are useful. Also nice is the RSS folder support. Sometime ago I used NewsGator which provided this same functionality but with NG 2.0 that product just constantly blew up or hung Outlook that I gave up on it. The RSS reading and foldering works well, although I’ve notfound a way to control the frequency of updates for the feeds as a whole. The damn feeds get updated on every Send and Receive which is very slow given that I have about 80 feeds. Damn it I just want my messages <g>…
Office is also the buggiest part of this install. Outlook frequently crashes – oddly usually when I’m not even in it and it’s just sitting idle in the background. Word too, has folded many times and in fact I ran into a couple of documents that make it bomb every time I open them. I use Word a lot everyday and I find the changes here of a mixed bag. The new Ribbon menu interface takes some getting used to. At first I was very skeptical of this interface, but it looks like it’s pretty smart in that in my work at least it IS in fact showing the things I’m look for most of the time. The problem arises when it doesn’t show what I need. Digging for choices through a Ribbon is a bit of visual work. For example, I was looking for the Word Count feature just today and I found it under the review menu as a small option. Not exactly intuitive but I suppose it wasn’t really easy to find things in the old menus and options dialogs either.
One thing that annoys me about the main office apps is the silly Windows Title Bar. Word and Excel and PowerPoint have these custom Window Titles which sort of tabs up and has a huge button and a few icons next to it. You can’t double click it to close the window and it doesn’t bring up the standard Window menu (Move, Size, Close etc.). Instead the button brings up a whole set of options. Why does Microsoft have to build these really non-standard interfaces that will be very difficult to duplicate? You know there will now be more third party controls that will try to mimic this funky, screwy behavior. I can understand some usability enhancements and I can see how the ribbon menu might be construed as being more usable. But that button is really just a gimmick to scream out – hey we’re different because we can.
Internet Explorer
Then there’s Internet Explorer 7.0. There are many improvements here as well. Most notable maybe is the built in default support for ClearType, which makes text look smoother than before even if ClearType is otherwise off in the system. This is similar to Word which did the same thing without asking. The rendered browser content just looks a lot cleaner. Also buttons get a facelift with a nice gradient and hover color behaviors that is inherited from stock Windows controls.
I also like the RSS features – Ability to see an RSS feed with an XSL stylesheet applied that makes it nice and easy to look at RSS feeds. Of course if you want to get at the raw XML now – that’s a bit more challenging – you can’t just View Source to get the XML. You’ll need Fiddler to grab the data as it comes off the wire. I suppose it’d be nice if there was an option to see the raw XML. The RSS ‘favorites’ too are easy to use and they use the same stylesheet to display the feeds. The feeds are shown in their raw Html form, so they’re not fixed up to try and look like something else (something I hate about FeedDemon which often mangles feed HTML).
XmlHttp now is a built-in component – no more ActiveX control which is nice but I guess doesn’t have any ground breaking affect as the component was a trusted component previously anyway. Another thing I’m glad to see is that the IE time fixed the fucked up behavior of DropDown lists. In the past drop down lists didn’t respect backgrounds and z-Orders or Opacity and always showed on top. This was painful especially for AJAX applications that try to overlay content on a page. DropDowns are finally fixed.
Unfortunately, there’s still no support for CSS opacity other than with DirectX filters. The Web Browser ActiveX control still hasn’t been updated to support Themes so you still get the ugly 3D format for any stock form controls in the Web Browser Control. It’s high time that gets fixed – how hard can that be?
I’ve run into a number of issues with IE 7 however. I’ve run into a number of sites that simply don’t work and IE reports it can’t connect. For example, the Account Logon page at American Express fails miserably as soon as you try to log in. I see similar behavior at another banking site. Jumping to the same Urls with FireFox works correctly. Also ran into some odd rendering problems with .Text where the admin module doesn’t display any but the first tab which is interesting. In other places IE renders containers funky in that they overlap incorrectly. Most of this is minor and isolated, but it’s a little worrying to see these sorts of failures on sites that work perfectly fine with IE 6 and FireFox.
I’m also not too happy with the IE toolbar/menu/button layout. The new way the UI works seems to be very disjointed and backwards. I suppose it’s more consistent but having the titlebar all the way at the top and the Home and tool buttons all the way at the bottom makes the UI feel disjointed. I use several toolbars that are prominent – Google and RoboForm specifically, and both toolbars feel more prominent than the address bar. From a pure subliminal point of view the eye is drawn to the Google Toolbar rather than the Address bar where you typically want to type text – hmmm… well maybe this is a good thing. These days I suppose Google is more frequently used than the address bar <g>. But I doubt that’s Microsoft’s intent.
Windows Live Messenger
Messenger grows up a little and looks more like a real application instead of this bubbly little interface. There are a number of nice features here including better organization of contacts, cleaner icons. I also like the fact that when you send multiple messages, you see those messages together instead of as separate entries with your name. This is a little thing, but I find this makes chat sessions much more readable.
Media Player Blow up
Finally today I managed to blow up Media Player. Somehow Media Player no longer works correctly. If I open WMP it opens but it shows an hour glass. It’ll play one song or video or whatever and then simply hang. Not sure what happened here. Worse I don’t know how to fix this. I can’t uninstall media player and reinstall – it’s hosed and there seems nothing I can do about it. Interestingly enough if I run media content in IE it works fine – it’s the standalone player that somehow has lost its connection with something else in the system it seems.
Security
Probably the most annoying thing about the Vista installation is security. I’ve already gone in and disabled User Access Control and the Administrator lock out features. UAC is a worthless feature as it bugs you when running just about ANY application. Click Ok to continue. And again, and again, and again. Security through inundation is not security at all – it’s just a nuisance and actually a real danger as you will fail to notice a ‘real’ security warning that might actually cause some real damage. So off that feature goes.
The other issue is that Microsoft wants to babysit us. “We know better than you!” I hate that attitude. Vista has this Adminstrator policy that makes even Administrators not Administrators. Ah yes that seems reasonable – you shouldn’t run as an admin anyway right? Maybe. Sure if you Joe Blow user that might make perfect sense. I’m checking out Vista and I want to see the system how it works. I’m dealing with Administrative task of configuration and setting up the system. So even after removing this ‘Adminstrator – not so fast buddy’ policy, I still can’t access some parts of the system. I can’t write files in the system directory, I can’t rename or remove files there. I can’t access my own user profile and manipulate say the Send To folder. I can’t access another user’s profile (ok, not a big deal). Apparently the only way to do any of these things is to log on as the Administrator account.
I understand the need for security, but c’mon. If I sign up to be an administrator and want full control over the system let me do it if I choose. Put up a dialog and warn me, fine. But damn, Microsoft is not my mother (not that Mom ever got far in controlling me <g>)… To add insult to injury Microsoft installs the default account as an Administrator account. Oh yeah, it all makes sense now…
Overall…
All that aside for day to day operations none of this really gets in the way. I have to admit I had really, really low expectations for this beta and expected to install, play and get back to XP. Instead on my second week with Vista and while there certainly are sore points, it’s quite workable and I’m sticking with it for the time being. It’s also notable that Vista itself has actually been very stable for me. I haven’t seen any hard crashes with the exception of Office. I’ve been using VS.NET with several Web and WinForms projects all day long without any problems. The only problem application at this point has been Office 12 and even there the crashes have been rare and when they do happen oddly when the app is idle.
On the other hand I can’t say that there’s really anything in Vista that makes me want to jump up and down in terms of functionality. Overall this feels merely like a nice once over for XP with a more flashy UI. Most of the new features are subtle and although they may have required a lot of work on Microsoft’s part, I think most users will probably feel mostly ho-hum about the various improvements.
I think a lot of the changes are for the better. One thing is that things have been rearranged everywhere. Nothing seems to be where you’d expect it from an Windows/XP perspective. But after looking over the places where things have moved I think that many things are organized more logically or have been consolidated into a broader UI.
So, it’s a mixed bag, but for me at least it has done better than expected so far. We’ll see what else starts falling apart like Media Player today <g>…