Vista – Like it or hate it?

I have been working with Vista for a while and after a few initial “What the…” moments I am starting to think that Vista is a pretty good OS whose benefits out-weigh its annoyances (let the flame wars begin in 3, 2, 1…)

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that Vista brings to the party. First off Microsoft really has been working on their security updates. In the past (and even to some extent currently) Microsoft has been ridiculed for their lack of security on their operating systems. One of the security enhancements on Vista is the User Account Control (UAC) feature. The way that UAC works is as follows; if you sign on as an administrator, two access tokens will be created; one with administrative privileges and one without. Normal operations on the Vista machine will be performed using the non-administrative token, but when you try to do a task that requires elevated privileges, you will be prompted to make sure that the task is something that you actually want to do and then the administrative token will be used. This is to prevent the ‘silent’ installation of malicious software that can be next to impossible to remove from your system.

The second item that I like about Vista is the start menu. I was always a big fan of the start menu on XP, I like the idea of everything in one place, but I have always disliked pausing the mouse over an item on the start menu, navigating to the next level, pausing the mouse again and so on. With the desktop search feature of Vista all that I need to do is bring up the start menu and start typing the command or application that I want to run, hit enter and the application starts. Having come from command line operating systems, I prefer to start applications from the keyboard instead of messing around with the mouse.

Even if you hate Vista you still have to admit that the visual interface is pretty nice. I have found that the image previews are very helpful with all of the different PowerPoint slide decks that I have to maintain for my classes. Many of the slide shows that I receive from other people have names that I am sure make sense to the authors, but for me, being able to see that first title slide make it easier for me to determine which one I need for a particular class or presentation. Another piece of ‘eye candy’ from Vista is the application preview from the task bar. I have to do a large number of downloads for some of the other instructors and being able to hover my mouse over the taskbar item to see if it’s done as opposed to maximizing the window to see the same information is much more efficient.

Other things that I have found to be useful with Vista include the Firewall, a lot better than what XP offered, Windows Defender, which has been added to reduce the spyware on your machine, the file system ‘breadcrumb’ and folder hierarchy makes files and folders easier to scan and maintain.

All in all Vista is turning out to be a worthy successor to XP. Please drop me a comment to let me know what you love or hate about Vista, but before you tell me your horror stories (or stories you have ‘heard’ about); think back a few years when there was another new operating system from Microsoft that had a ‘Toys-R-Us’ interface, new security features that generally protected us from ourselves and also caused a massive uproar across the IT industry…yep, you guessed it XP.

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