Stuff They Did Right in Vista

To be fair, I do have to mention a few things I LIKE about Vista:


Task Manager
The Processes tab now shows the command-line and a description for each process. You can also right-click on a process and view its properties or open the executable's folder. These improvements make it real easy to figure out what each process is for (especially for identifying services associated with svchost.exe processes), and for rooting out spyware and gratuitous resource hogs.

The new Services tab is much more convenient than the Services applet. You can navigate directly to the process associated with a service by right-clicking on the service and selecting "Go to process".

Resource Monitor
You can see which processes are consuming the most CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and disk access. This takes the guesswork out of figuring out who is hogging up the network bandwidth.



Ubiquitous and fast search
There's a search box in the Start Menu, Open File dialogs, IE 7, and Windows Explorer. Definitely speeds things up.

Oooohhh, pretty!
The Windows Aero glass interface looks very nice. My nontechie wife was won over by the new photo screensaver.

Automatic offline file synchronization

Haven't tried this yet.

Windows Explorer
Tasks are now placed in a dedicated toolbar instead of the XP way where a task panel fought with the folders panel for screen real estate.

The new drop down arrows in the address bar make it very easy to navigate your directory hierarchy, especially when you need to backtrack to a neighboring subdirectory (I find that I do this a lot).

Other new features are the Open Command Prompt Here and Restore Previous Version right mouse menu items. Vista automatically stores previous versions of files and folders. It must be doing something fancy under the covers to not store the entire contents of the file/folder (perhaps it's using the differencing algorithms used by offline file synchronization).

I like the level of detail control for listing files (CTRL+mouse wheel).

The only thing I don't like is that the default folder that you start in is your profile folder which is totally useless. Just getting to the C:\ drive takes several clicks and scrolling. Much more painful than with XP.

Stay away from Vista RTM!

My computer is now completely screwed because of Vista RTM. After I upgraded from XP to Vista RTM, I encountered numerous problems:

(Note: Most of these problems were for my desktop. Strangely, my laptop has had no problems with Vista RTM.)

1. RTM not ready for primetime. Many devices (printers, pocket pc, etc.) don't work. For example, Canon and HP aren't planning on providing Vista drivers until 2007. Dell won't support Vista until March 2007. If you have problems with your Dell system after installing Vista RTM, you're out of luck! Even several Microsoft products (SQL Server, VS 2005) don't support Vista yet.
2. Diagnostics suck. Event Viewer is useless. Clicking on the "Get Help Online" link for an event shows a web page that says "yada yada, OS (Vista) not supported, yada yada". No Error Reporting or Dr. Watson. Programs die silently like they used to for Win 95.
3. Outlook 2007 crashes. (This happens on my desktop not my laptop.) I eventually had to uninstall Office 2007, install Office XP, and upgrade to Office 2007.
4. SLOW! My overall impression of Vista is that everything related to the shell is slower than with XP. Startup is very very slow (~10 mins). Event Viewer reports errors confirming the slowness. (This is only a problem for my desktop computer, my laptop has no problems.)
5. Registry Editor no longer highlights the open key. So when you do a search, you have to track down the right key manually.
6. Security is totally annoying! I seriously have to click on 5 different versions of "Allow" in order to install a piece of software. I have to click a nag box even for simple things. I'm close to turning off User Account Control and other security features just because it is so annoying.
7. Overall flakiness. I suspect this is because of the new User Account Control feature. For example, clicking on "Update my score" in Performance Information and Tools eventually causes a message about a problem with WinSTA. Many installation programs (including Microsoft's) assume you are running as Administrator and will fail in mysterious ways.
8. Hard to customize the Start Menu. It used to be as simple as dropping program icons into a new folder. For some reason (probably User Account Control) I'm not able to do this.

UPDATE: I finally gave up on Vista RTM after realizing that my printer, Pocket PC, Outlook, VPN connection to my office, and audio DO NOT WORK and most other things are SLOW or FLAKY. I decided to rollback to Windows XP. Curse you Vista RTM! You cost me 4 days! KAAAAAAAAAAAHNN!

Creating Desktop Shortcuts for Outlook 2007 notes

I like to have a desktop shortcut for my TODO note in Outlook. The way this is done changed in Outlook 2007:

1. Right-click on your desktop and select New -> Shortcut
2. You'll be prompted for a target program. Locate outlook.exe.
3. Right-click on the new shortcut and select Properties
4. Add the /select switch to the command-line. Here's an example:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /select outlook:Notes/~TODO

The name after the tilde (~) is the name of note you want to open.