The first, and my favorite, redeeming quality about Windows Vista is the File Explorer breadcrumb. This new feature allows me to see exactly where I am within the hierarchy of the file system. Windows XP "sort of" has this - you can turn on an option that lets you see the full folder path. The difference is that you can interact independently with each folder in the hierarchy. For example, if you are looking at an Explorer window for C:\Program Files\Test, you can click the down arrow next to "Program Files" and get a list of sub-folders beneath "Program Files". If you click one of the sub-folders you'll switch to that directory. Clicking on the name of any folder in the breadcrumb hierarchy will take you immediately to that folder. At first this feature looked like it was in the way, but now I find myself navigating using this
and nothing else. The only thing I would add is that when you click the down-arrow, I would
really love to see a "New Folder" option at the end of the list of sub-folders.
The other redeeming quality is that I can shut off Aero ;) That's right - if you switch to "Classic" theme within Windows Vista, your
dwm.exe process consumption goes from 80MB to 10MB - cleaning up 70MB of RAM immediately. It isn't just the RAM either - when my Tablet is on battery power, all that Aero crap sucks battery power like a Hoover. I still get all of the new features of Vista, they just don't show up with fancy gradients and the windows don't bounce, wiggle, shake, or otherwise
hurt my eyes. I have been noticing that the more I use Vista with all of the eye-candy enabled, the more my eyes hurt from watching windows bounce and shake everywhere. Could be because I'm an old fart, or could be that the interface was designed to be flashy and nobody gave a single thought to how long someone's eyes could tolerate looking at it.
The last is both a redeeming quality and a resounding failure. It seems as though the Windows Vista file system has complete support for tags. Anything I save to my disk from Word 2007 prompts me for tags. When I create a new text file in notepad, I can see the tags list. However, sometimes the tags list doesn't show up - other times I can't even edit it. The "Pictures" custom shell folder has full support for tags, though they aren't utilized. Basically what's missing from the Windows Vista file system is a
tag-cloud enabled File Explorer! If anybody on the dev team is reading this
PUT THIS INTO VISTA. :)
That's about it so far. As I continue to try and integrate using Vista into my daily life and ween myself off of XP, I am sure that I will find more benefits and more failings. The reason I am doing this is because you can't possibly tell the viability of an operating system from tinkering with it for a few minutes. I am attempting to create a situation where I use Vista for everything I normally use Windows XP for. This will show me
exactly where Vista fails and exactly where it shines. Anything less is an experiment without enough data.
tags: experiment vista tablet beta
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