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A Week with Vista

Over the last week I’ve been making an effort to use Vista Business Edition instead of Windows XP SP2, which has meant much of the last week has been spent running in a virtual computer. Despite being a home user I’m running the Business Edition of Vista because that’s what I have a legal licence key for. I don’t do games so I don’t really miss anything gaming related in that respect either. In addition to Windows Vista Business I’ve been using Office 2007 Enterprise, and this blog entry is being written in Word 2007 following the dramatic loss of it last night while typing direct into FireFox. In addition to this due to various things going on at work I’ve also ended up looking at Wiki/Server hosting solutions this week too, with focus on Windows SharePoint Services 3. It’s going to be a bit of a big entry…

Taking Vista first, there are undoubtedly some good points and undoubtedly some places where it’s not quite right too. First off let’s talk about the applications that I couldn’t get to run initially. Dolby Lake Controller will probably run fine on a proper machine rather than a virtual one. Virtual PC 2007 limits video memory to 8mb which is not enough for v4.2. Both the D5 and D1 editors work fine, once you put them in XP SP2 compatibility mode, otherwise they run slowly. This was the cause of the previous error as I tried to shut them down before they’d finished starting despite having been able to edit the configuration of the surface. Again though, this could be down to Virtual Machine issues rather than Vista.
So that done, what’s good about Vista? You’d expect a new operating system to have some improvements, and it most certainly has got some, what’s more disappointing is that not everything is an improvement.

• The user interface is improved over the “Luna” scheme in XP. Despite the fact that I’m only running Vista Basic graphics and not Aero, things do look a little smarter, it’s a bit neater, a little more intuitive a little more, dare I say it, Mac like. Having said that the interface has its quirks which I’ll look at under what’s bad about Vista. Other nice tweaks are having the desktop on Alt-Tab switching and a “Show Desktop” option on the start menu. Once again the parodies between Vista and OS.X’s Finder are difficult to ignore here.

• Speed is very good, despite running a supposedly bloated operating system in a virtual machine with only 512Mb of RAM this feels quicker and snappier than XP SP2. This might be something to do with having less programs installed (just Office, iTunes, Sound stuff, Firefox, Acrobat Reader 8) but generally it feels faster all round which can only be a good thing.

• The Windows Firewall is now a 2-way affair not just incoming.

• Backup and restore is improved (it now supports using CDs and DVDs at last), but it’s not close to some of the custom applications like Restrospect of course. The major advantage of it is that every Windows Vista machine will have it making the data that bit simpler to recover should you need to by using another Vista machine.

• ReadyDrive is given as a feature but actually should really be a case of “supported hardware”, the support for hard drives with a flash memory cache on them, a brilliant idea for laptops everywhere.

• Networking and Wireless in general seem to be somewhat better supported, especially wireless security, but I can see the Network Map being banned in corporate circumstances as you don’t necessarily want everyone being able to see what goes where. Having said that it’s a great tool for an admin to find out who’s got illegitimate shares going on within the company.

• Network projector support, this is possibly one of the best features in my view. No more playing with USB key drives to find a presentation, just log on to the project and send it all over Ethernet.

• Windows Update is no longer an IE kludge; it’s an application in its own right and much better for it.

• Mail and Calendar are a big improvement on Outlook Express, but then so is a bowl of muesli. Most corporate users will be replacing it with Outlook 2007/Exchange, Groupwise or Notes anyway. The feature set is about the same as Apple currently offers in iCal with shared calendars etc being available.

• Windows Meeting space is quite clever, but may be seen as insecure by some admins as it would give potential for easier transfer of files outside the company. While thinking about the sharing of files the local shared folders thing might be useful but most companies have network based shared data, which is far more useful because then you aren’t tied to one computer and your network servers are RAID backed with central backups… they are, aren’t they? The updated Folder Redirection and Roaming Profile support is also most welcome. There’s nothing worse than waiting hours for profiles to be dragged across the network, not only is it messy and inefficient, there’s just no need. I’m not sure about leaving all a users profile on each machine they visit, that could very quickly get space inefficient, but being able to use a roaming profile and redirect certain folders only is very handy to get stateless computing.

• WIM and Image deployment is much better than previously, but I suspect most admins already have a nice XP SP2 image they load from their server anyway, along with a set of machines like the HP dc range which use common driver packages. On the same note BitLocker is a great idea and could make all computers really secure, so why isn’t it in every copy of Windows Vista not just Enterprise and Ultimate?!

• Data transfer control… if one thing is going to sell Vista into the Enterprise it’s being able to ensure your data isn’t leaving the enterprise without authorisation.

The good is good, the bad is disappointing and in some cases just silly. I haven’t commented on Media Centre as I don’t have access or need for it. All my music is in iTunes not Media Player, all my photos are manually sorted though I’m looking forward to getting iPhoto back for looking after them. I’m not big on videos on a computer so I’ve not got many of them. So with those thoughts in mind this is what’s bad about Vista in my view…

• The user interface has icons that are just far too big to be sensible. It might be nice at high resolutions but even at 1280×1024 they are just too big to be sensible. I’ve halved the icon size from the standard and even so they are larger than necessary, smarter looking, but too big. Sticking with the UI, in XP you can hit the start key on the keyboard and then hit the letter that starts one of your pinned applications, in Vista this assumes you wish to search for something starting with said letter. No I just want keyboard access to the start menu, Searching is useful but it’s something that is not needed all the time.

• Automatic Disk Defragmentation, which isn’t. Mac OS.X defrags on the fly so MS implemented automatic defragmentation… but in exactly the same way as it was done in Windows 98, with a task scheduler running to automatically defrag the computer at a certain time. If the computer isn’t on at that time, well sorry mate you missed the boat.

• User Account Control. UAC is a horrendous application as not only does it intrude when it doesn’t need to (since when was changing the dpi of icons a security related task?), it also prevents you doing anything else until you’ve pandered to its requests. People will continually click continue just because it comes up so often you give up reading the requests. Even more people will turn it off and that’s sad, because not only do that mean you turn off UAC but you then turn off the security centre notification icon to avoid having a red warning shield up all the time, this of course means you don’t notice when your anti-virus software has gone out of date or your spyware definitions need updating.

• Some things have been needlessly spread out e.g. display settings, instead of being many tabs in one window, now you have multiple windows making flicking back and forth between settings a bit slower. This goes back to my earlier comments on the Network settings too.

• XPS Format. Seriously Microsoft, we don’t need another PDF. PDF is supported on every platform; the standard is recognised and approved. Don’t give us a format that you say is open but actually is currently only actively supported on Windows by yourselves. IF you write converters for Mac, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX etc then maybe it will go somewhere, but what does it actually add? Not only that but when opening said files in IE7 everything slows down as they are huge, huge memory hogs. Currently IE is using over 200MB of RAM on my virtual machine to show me a 25MB XPS file on the features of Vista. How is that efficient?

• IE7 printing. They actually make a fuss that IE7 is able to shrink web pages to fit a printed page… what like every other browser/application has been doing for years you mean?

• ReadyBoost. Use a USB2 key drive with over 256Mb free on it to act as additional (not very fast by RAM standards but faster than a hard disk) memory. What a GIMMICK, to make it always effective you’d need a USB stick with say 1Gb free on it, which means spending £13 on the stick in the first place to get one that is ReadyBoost supported. For £30 you can get an extra 1 GB of RAM anyway and it doesn’t take up a USB port in the process. OK so it could be useful but it’s a bit like using a bit of duct tape to hold a car door shut, it works but it’s not the proper way to do it.

• I can’t comment on the parental controls because they aren’t in Vista Business but it seems an odd thing to leave out as surely the same engine could be used to control access to applications and the internet in the workplace via ISA server?

• Why oh why isn’t driver signing compulsory in 32 Bit Vista as well?

• Windows Rights Management, I get worried when things start talking about my right to do certain things. I don’t do illegal content, I own all my DVDs but why should I buy a special monitor just so that the computer believes me when I want to watch James Bond that it is approved?

So, 1800 words on, is Vista better than XP Pro SP2? Well I’d have to say yes it is. It’s not the step change the Microsoft want you to believe it is, more of an evolution. There’s enough features to sell it to a home user on ease of use (it is easier to do most things) and there’s enough extra for the corporate market to make it saleable there too.

The only trouble is if you’re a home user, Vista isn’t worth the extra money to buy off the shelf. Home Premium Edition (which thankfully is less of a balls up than XP Home) retails at £182 for an off the shelf box, £130 as an upgrade and £72 as an OEM copy. Of course MS doesn’t want you to buy the OEM copy which is the same as the retail version because you aren’t an OEM, you didn’t build your computer in most cases. I bet they’d rather have some of that £72 though than having nothing from a pirated copy, so I suspect that’s why not too much of a song and dance has been made about it being widely available from Dabs and Scan to name but a couple of sources, and even Amazon are in on the act. By contrast the top version, Ultimate is £304 Retail, £204 Upgrade and £124 OEM. As an OEM edition it undoubtedly offers the best value of any version of Vista given that it can link into the corporate network and be a media centre. MS should just be reasonable and provide one type of Vista (Ultimate) and provide it for say £130. Then they would be much better placed than the fictional price ladder they are trying for.

In the corporate world most people are covered by Software Assurance licences that enable them to upgrade to the latest versions anyway. Though it might be effective to buy a small business stuff and then upgrade again in a few years time, for most with more than a dozen people or so it’s far more effective to have a rolling licence plan. The delay here is most corporate desktops are probably not able to cope with Vista, and if you’ve got an installed base of 2-6 year old machines or perhaps even some slightly older running XP Pro or even 2000, with nice network based images set up and a good management framework you might be tempted to ask if the extra hardware expense is worth it.

The final though is that Vista feels nice, it feels slick in a way that Windows generally doesn’t. It’s classier than before and more responsive too. It just feels little puts it well ahead of Mac OS.X back in version 10.3 when I last used it. Apple are about to release 10.5 with some additional features that will beat MS at their game for the home user once again. Windows scores in being able to play games and work on a corporate network. If neither of those is too important then OS.X is better, slicker and more standards compliant while being more secure too. Things like Spaces and Desktop Animation are one ahead of Vista, while OS.X Server 10.5 comes ever closer to offering the same as you can get on Windows with iCal Server and the standard Mail server you can now replicate most of what Exchange can do (though Exchange is still a superior product for large corporate work), you can manage Mac Clients in the same way as you can Windows clients under Active Directory, all the while Windows is also fully supported as a client to log on.

Both operating systems have a way to go, if Apple wants the Enterprise desktop then it needs to have a solution to Exchange and persuade MySQL to implement the same standards of database support that SQL Server offers. On the desktop and for the home user Vista is excellent if you already have a PC, but if you are contemplating where to go, the Mac is certainly worth a look especially with Office 2008 due out this summer.

Christopher Hinds : 13 May 2007 10:17 |  Tags: Active Directory Apple Exchange ITS Mac Os X Microsoft Office 2007 Programs Servers Sound Technology Windows Windows Vista Xp |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem