The hype surrounding Windows Vista was too much for me so I headed out to the shop and bought a new system capable of running Vista. I did not have much of an idea of what Vista would be like. I had read the occasional article and seen a few screen shots but I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I took it home and hooked it all up and pressed the power button. The computer came to life and there was no login required to get to the desktop. I was greeted by the Welcome Center which showed me the specs of my new computer. There were a few shortcuts to look after various tasks such as transferring data from my old computer and to add/modify user accounts. I closed this window down and had a look around.

This is a brief article explaining my first few days with Vista. I have had good look around and found many nice features. It is likely that we will all come across Vista sometime in the future and this article will prepare you for your first touch of Vista. So far I love it though it is like a Rolls Royce without a gearbox; in that it looks very nice but you can’t do much with it yet. In general, current games do not work with it and you will probably do best sticking with XP unless you only want to run Microsoft Office apps which it does well. I look forward to seeing what it is capable of as the weeks and months roll on but at this stage, it doesn’t offer a great deal.

(Update - 10 Days in: Vista is running very well and stable. I have tried to get some of my games up and running in Vista and I have had great success. Please read my article “Vista Gaming: Will your games work under Vista?” for a complete rundown of my experience with gaming in Vista.)

A detailed list of what software has been tested and is known to work under Vista is at iexbeta.com.

There are many more new features than what is listed in this article and I am sure I will find many more nice surprises as I continue using Vista. These are a few of the highlights that struck me as I started my appreciation of Vista.

Interface:

There is a new taskbar which has the same functionality as the old one with a few nice additions such as preview windows for open applications which change in real time to what that screen is doing, so things like the visualisations in Media Player show up in these preview windows.

There is a new sidebar showing RSS feeds and an analog clock. As there is a clock already on the front of my computer as well as a clock in the task bar, I closed the sidebar as I don’t see it as being much use to me yet. I am sure worthwhile additions to this will be available in the near future.

A big change to the layout is the Start Menu. Your frequently used programs are still shown and on the right hand side of the new start menu is your music, pictures, videos etc. They have removed the “My” from the front of each of them. Everything is much tidier and easier to navigate around. I then went into the all programs section. This I did not like as it is more like an explorer window, where you click on a folder to show the programs in it, unlike previous versions of windows where the contents pop up. I can see this as getting nasty as more programs go onto the computer. The space for the list was not large enough and I have still not installed any extra applications.

There is also a search function where you can search for files or get to a website. There is no need to go into run as you can run files from this box.

It is all familiar and easy to use and there should be no dramas using this if you are used to the modern menu in XP(as opposed to classic).

All Windows have transparent features by default and it is a big improvement over XP. I won’t go too much into the visuals as screenshots won’t do the experience justice. It is very nice.

I have seen many reports on the web that Vista has copied a lot of Mac OS features. When something is good, you would adapt it. I am sure Mac OS used many XP features when it came out. It’s like a car company adding airbags. It is a good feature so other companies are bound to pick it up and add this feature.

All the icons have been recreated as you would expect with this major release. I really like the network connectivity icon in the task tray. It shows if you have access to local network or the internet. The single icon shows you so much. This is the same for many icons but this one stood out for me.

A lot of the new desktop effects just look nice and don’t offer anything to help you do things faster. Looking good is fine with me. I guess this desktop will look boring in 2 years time but I am sure that there will be some fairly fancy themes released in the future to get even better effects on your desktop.

File Locations:

Vista is much neater in the way it stores your files. It is all now in plain English and you don’t need to navigate so deep to get to where you need to get to from what I have seen so far. I am sure Microsoft still has some hidden files somewhere but I have not needed to get to them yet which is very comforting.

As well as the expected Program Files and Windows folder, each user has their own folder. There is no longer a need to go into “Documents and Settings” to reach this. Each user has a heap of folders associated with their profile. There is Documents, Music, Pictures, Video as well as things like saved games.

Also in Explorer there is no more “My Network Places”. This is replaced by “Network” which gives you everything you need to get around the other computers on your network.

I really liked that if I hooked up my camera or PDA, the memory cards show up in the listing of available drives, allowing you to easily copy your pictures off the drives. It even shows up how much space is available and used in the drive graphically under the icon.

These are all great improvements which make Vista nice to use over XP. I am looking forward to getting more familiar with it.

Sync Center:

While Windows XP did have a similar feature to see what was syncing, even combining task scheduler and SyncToy, the Sync Center offers so much more. It allows you to see all the items you have requested to sync and it allows you to schedule them.

Sync Center also reports your Pocket PC sync. It is so much nicer than what was possible in XP. It was never all that obvious that all this was possible in XP but now it has been brought out in the open as a big feature of Vista.

I am looking forward to writing articles about this and how to get the most out of it. While we could achieve much of this in XP, it was much messier as you will see from some of the articles already at Inspect My Gadget. This makes it all clean and easily recoverable.

Backup and Restore:

While XP had backup and Restore, Vista goes that 20 steps forward and allows you to restore individual folders. If you make a bad change or delete files, you can now easily get them back.

 All you need to do is right click on the folder and select “Restore previous versions”. You then get a a dialog as is the one on the left. It offers me to go back to any previous restore points which it has created automatically. As you can see from the times, it offers an update very frequently.

I am not sure how it is determined when a restore point will be made but from the picture, it looks like every change creates a new restore point. Time will tell.

There is also a new “Backup and Restore Center” in the control panel which looks much more user friendly than the backup and restore options in XP. I might even start using it.

Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) :

This is not a feature of Vista but I am very excited about it. It is a free download from Microsoft. It does basically the same thing as ActiveSync, it just does it better. WMDC has a much nicer interface with less options to confuse users.

You have the same options to install and uninstall programs, view files on the device and setup partnerships. There are a few nice added features such as tools to extract pictures and place them in your “Pictures” folder, and the same options with music to keep your music player ready with the tracks you want.

This is a big step up from Activesync which had many updates over the time XP was available, with each update not offering anything new. Whilst all the tools in WMDC were available before, it was not as easy to get these tasks to happen. It would normally take many more steps and involve tools outside of ActiveSync.

Conclusion:

As you can see, there are many nice improvements over XP in all of the above sections. There is bound to be many other improvements that I have not found yet. My Windows XP directory (excluding program files) takes up 5.8GB of my hard drive and my Vista directory (excluding program files but with years of excess drivers) is 8.6GB (fresh install) and I don’t think that much of it would be pictures, but rather new features.

It is not time to buy Vista yet for most people unless all you want to run is Office applications, as there is not much software that will run on it, especially for gaming. I am very happy I kept my XP machine connected. I take comfort in the fact that it is a major operating system by Microsoft so I can rest assured that software and hardware companies will embrace Vista and release new products for it. I like to think Vista is too advanced for the software we used in XP and that the software which will work on Vista will utilise all the new features making our computers something very special and enjoyable.

(Update - 10 Days in: Vista is running very well and stable. I have tried to get some of my games up and running in Vista and I have had great success. Please read my article “Vista Gaming: Will your games work under Vista?” for a complete rundown of my experience with gaming in Vista.

I will continue to say that for most people, it is not time to get Vista for gaming yet as many games require a few extra steps to get running, generally being more complicated than simply installing and running. If you are comfortable with computers and updating patches, drivers and doing a few tweaks, You can probably enjoy your gaming experience in Vista now. It won’t be long before all your games will work under Vista. Maybe buy your family a new Vista computer for Christmas.)

I am really excited about exploring these new features and letting you know about them and how to use them as they were meant to be used, or as they can be used. Check back to inspectmygadget.com to see what I come across. For now though if you do get Vista, sit back and enjoy the great Texas Hold ’em Poker which is an Ultimate extra or check out the new effects in the updated solitaire.