I started a series of Open Letters not too long ago, which is my way of making light of the typically serious “Open Letter” concept to thinly disguise my suggestions and minor complaints as something that should be taken seriously. 

Or in other words, maybe I can fake my way into a solution.

This episode is about Vista.

WARNING: POTENTIAL MISUNDERSTANDING AHEAD. 

First off, I’m in love with Vista.  Before I moved over, I heard horror stories about using Vista.  Look, I’m a technophile.  I’m an IT Director for a large ISP.  I’m familiar with over 20 operating systems, and a few of those, I can honestly say I’m intimately familiar.

However, I experienced little by way of horror storiness when I moved to Vista a couple of month ago.  I attribute that success to a few things:

1. I’m really really smart
2. I’m really really lucky
3. I went straight to Vista w/SP1
4. I had a kick-ass machine (Core 2 Duo laptop) with lots of RAM (3GB)
5. I used VMWare to make my old XP image available as-it-was-before.
6. I would google a problem when I encountered it, worked to understand and solve it at the time vs throwing my arms up in disgust and giving up and blog online complaining about it.

I’d say while all of these reasons were important, #6 was the biggest factor.

Now, to the Mr/Mrs Vista Developer that might be reading this.  I want to compliment you on a great, fantastic superb job on this OS.  Specifically, I want to point out a few things that have impressed me over my recent adoption to Vista so that you know I like them so much.

Search

Search is awesome. Thank you.  This probably saves me an hour a day.  Well, maybe not so much as it saves me time - it makes me able to do certain things in a much shorter period of time, so it’s more likely I get them done.  A lot of the time, it involves finding something in my email or a document, and Search just plain works.  Except for the time my index got corrupted and it had to rebuild.  That sucked. 

Standby / Resume / multi-monitor setup

My laptop and I are on full speaking terms now.  Before the upgrade, docking and undocking caused near panic attacks because I was never sure if the screen would be visible, if the left would be right, or what.  Now, tho — man I never give it a second thought.  It suspends in no time, wakes up automatically, and I haven’t gotten “stuck” yet.  When I dock at work, which has two external monitors with one rotated 90 degrees, it remembers.  When I dock back at home, which uses laptop and one external, it remembers.  When I open the laptop with no external monitors, it remembers. 

Handles crashes better

I’m sure there’s more than just one person saying “whoa” what do you mean - it still crashes?!?!?  Yes.  Sure it does.  When you have an OS that’s adopted by the entire world and run on more hardware than ANYTHING, there will be problems.  But unlike its predecessors, Vista w/SP1 makes crashing almost fun!  You get these great colorful windows, it lets you know what happened, and it tracks all of them for you.  You can actually see all your crashes, check for a status online and be notified when its fixed (if applicable).  I for one am very impressed with this aspect of Windows.  It makes it easier to figure out

UAC - User Access Control

Yes, I admit it.  I love this stuff!  The mac vs PC commercials will have you dreading your first popup (brilliant marketing there, boys!) but really - it’s an incredible boon to more secure computing.  I *like* having the OS complain when something you’re running is about to do something potentially disastrous.  I *like* having to right-click on a setup program and say ‘run as administrator’ so that I’m telling the OS  - “hey, I’m installing something here, so it’s OK to do stuff like write to the registry”. 

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I’m sure that if I bit the bullet and switched to Mac OSX, I’d have the same adoption curve and probably find a million things to fall in love with.  But I can’t use that knowledge at my job, and that’s a major deciding factor.  I don’t have time to learn a 2nd OS “just because” - besides, I’d still have to learn Vista and develop a deployment and support plan for our company for hundreds of desktops and laptops.

See, if you got a Mac with VMware Fusion, then you could run XP, Vista, Server 2003… whatever AND have Mac in the background for when Vista decides it wants to take a dump.

I’ve used Vista twice… neither time was at work (we are still XP here for all user workstations). One of the times I used it was to get a friend’s laptop setup on my WiFi at home. It took over 30 mins to get it connected. As a long time IT guy, it was confusing to me. XP and Mac I can have up and running in less than 5 mins.

I plan to fully dive into Vista someday, but for now, it’s not on my list of priorities.

martymankinss last blog post..New Flavor, meet Trusted Brand

If anyone knows of a freeware working search utility for Vista, let me know.

dmarkss last blog post..Bridge Out

Gee. Where do I start.

I hate absolutely everything about Vista. EVERYTHING. I hate the tacky and inconsistent way it looks. I hate the way that the GUI keeps getting in the way. I hate all the compatibility problems and flakey drivers. I hate the file browser, the web browser, and the registry browser. I hate the way that a half-dozen dialogue boxes exist when only one is really needed. I hate hate HATE the stupid permissions crap that locks the OS down so tight that even simple tasks become difficult. I hate the way security has added loads of extra processing on everything, killing performance. I loathe to the point of absolute rage the stupid-ass “ribbon” elements that crap all over Office and other “Vista enhanced” apps. I hate the wretched DRM drizzled all over the OS at a system level. Worst of all… I HATE THE NON-STOP FRAKING POP-UPS THAT PLAGUE THE USER EXPERIENCE EVERY 5 MINUTES!!! You LIKE the UAC? I think it is the single worst step backwards in an OS in recent memory. How can you be productive when you’re being interrupted all the time? Shouldn’t the OS be HANDLING this crap so the end-user doesn’t have to? BLARGH! DON’T GET ME STARTED!!

Vista is an unpredictable, unproductive, clumsy, pathetic evolution of Windows that offers no real-life advantage over XP, but instead heaps on failures (on top of failure) at every level. I’m a Mac guy that has to use Windows from time to time, and have learned to tolerate XP. I was SO looking forward to Vista in the hopes it would be “Mac-like” and more pleasant to use. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’d rather use DOS than Windows. Just try being a graphic designer trying to get your work done with Vista fighting you every step of the way. No thanks.

The one good thing about Vista is that I’ve come to appreciate that XP isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a personal computer anymore.

Dave2s last blog post..Pride!

Ummm…..wha?

I use Google Desktop and my search is very quick, and that’s in XP. When the OS by itself requires high RAM, that annoys me. I don’t think I’ll change until I have no other choice.

Avitables last blog post..Help me out, fuckers

Well now. I just bought a new Dell and it has Vista, I’d heard nothing but horror stories about it - mainly from Dave2 - but I tell ya, for the relatively average ‘puter user, I like it. No problems. Yet. If at all. :shrug:

Michelles last blog post.."I just saw a guy howling at the moon"

martymankins, if I had a mac, I’d have to learn it AND Vista. I am a Unix guy so maybe it wouldn’t be that hard, assuming I can go as unixy as I would want…

And I failed to mention that my first taste of Vista was just like yours - helping a friend/family member get their Vista box working and I was frustrated as all get out. And it was also due to networking. They should have included a start menu button entitled “used to XP? click here for help”.

dmarks, the built-in search for Vista is what I use and I love it. I haven’t tried Google Desktop yet on Vista, so I can’t vouch for it.

Dave2, I have to point out a couple of errors in your tirade. Please permit me to constructively debate on this, and while I cannot debate about your hatred, at least I can debate on what you might be missing. Don’t take this as a return lob in a flame war; think of it more like a negotiator in a hostage situation, trying to calm down the guy with the gun. I’m your friend, or at least I’d like to be. We can have an adult conversation if we both stick to relevant facts, and if we avoid tangents that bring no added value to the situation.

Having said that, I’d like to start listing my comments to you, assuming you have an open mind.

First of all - Frakking is spelled with two K’s.

Actually, that’s it.

Hopefully, we can get past the inanity of arguing and just understand one another. That’s how we make progress.

BlondeBlogger, you forgot the two l’s. my blog name is ‘whall’ not ‘wha’

Avitable, You should ask how much ram Dave2 has in his MAC.

Michelle, You heard negative things about Vista from Dave2? I don’t believe you.

Um, s/ng/n’, Frakking is Frakkin’. http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Frak

Gally, my gods, you’re right. touche.

Hmm, I installed Vista on my computer and decided that I’d stick with it or go back to XP once SP1 comes out, well, bummer. I don’t really agree with Dave on that one simply because I’ve never had a hard time on Vista and I’m also a graphic designer, I prefer having My CONTROL and ALT work the way they should instead of having 2 bajillion keys to push just to get a “shortcut” going, but I guess that’s just how people get used to work. Vista doesn’t look tacky, come on! If anything looks tacky is Pre-tiger OSX and Windows XP default themes.

But in the end, seriously I went back to XP. Vista seriously blows and the only reason why it’s actually on the market is because all manufacturers are getting subsidised by Microsoft just to bundle Vista with everything they sell. SP1 didn’t change anything for me, and if anybody actually read the release notes, 50% of the fixes are related to security (uh……) and maybe 10% are towards compatibility, which none of the issues were fixed that I was having (forget compatibility mode, it works 0.2% of the time, lol)

Anyway, I’m waiting for Windows 7.

Whall, I thought you were sarcastic about loving Vista search. I can’t get an easy searc for *filename*.* to work on it, and in order to search in every directory I have to dig into buried “advanced” options and turn them on each time. I hardly ever bother. Even when I do that, the files never turn up.

dmarkss last blog post..Bridge Out

Dash, I thought SP1 actually changed the underlying kernel to the Windows Server 2008 one… *looking*, yup, Microsoft replaces Vista kernel in SP1. SP1 also fixed serious suspend/resume issues, which would be absolutely key for me and is one of the reasons I wanted to get out of XP. What issues were you having that SP1 didn’t fix? Also I should point out that I didn’t install Vista and *then* SP1… I installed the “Vista w/SP1 built-in” image. And I installed the available-through-SA-only Vista Enterprise, which adds complete laptop encryption.

dmarks, hmm, I don’t have that problem. I just type in “stats” for example and my results in the start menu overlay include all the files with the letters “stats” in them or results that have stats in the document/email/web page.

But you are probably ask for something in the filename itself, NOT stuff *in* the file. Right? So use one of the properties delimiters (filename). for example, “filename:stats”

You can see it’s giving me only web pages that have “stats” in the TITLE tag, files with “stats” in the filename and emails with “stats” in the subject.

You can get more info on the advanced command-line shortcuts available from windowsvistablog.com.

Also, you may want to rebuild your index if it isn’t finding what you know is there. Unless you’re trying to find something that isn’t indexed, like Program Files or the Windows directory.

Will that work with standard file search syntax? Where filename:stats will find a file named “stats”, fiilename stats*.* fill find any beginning with stats, and file name:*stats*.* finds any file with stats in the name anywhere?

dmarkss last blog post..Butlerian Jihad

I’ll eventually end up on Vista. At the moment my 52 nodes will stay on XP. I have too many user issues to roll out Vista to them. They can’t even find a file they save 2 minutes before and I’m gonna give them Vista? I think not… yet anyway.
As for Avitable’s remark about the OS requiring so much RAM… Dude, this has been the case since Windows 3.1. Each succeeding MS OS has used more memory than the prior incarnation to the point that people always howl about how much is required to run it. When XP came out, I could hear the howls of outrage across the net about how much more memory was needed than Win2K. But Win2K couldn’t have run all those fancy ass games that developers were making. The apps progress and require more RAM and so does the OS. At least in the MS world it does…
Whall, I’m glad your migration went so well. I expect some issues when we roll it out, but we’ll do it in stages and it won’t be too bad. I’ll probably be the first one with it.

Winters last blog post..Hotties Again

I still hate vista cause most of the goofy yahoo games I want to play aren’t compatible dang it