15/09/2008 by Gavin.

I’ve never been the most organised person, and I used to have to make a real effort to archive and file documents properly.  I have around 3TB in hard disk space full of ’stuff’.

With the harsh criticism that Vista gets I’d like to trumpet one feature that really has been a huge thing for me, instant search.

Whether it’s mail, documents or programs, I do virtually everything now from the Vista search box.  No more organising programs into folders and sub folders, I never file mail into separate directories for ‘family or ‘work’, no more ’start - accessories - progx - prog’,  and I don’t worry about where I saved that document.  Just type the first few letters of what you’re looking for into the search box and up it comes.

Now, I know I use pretty powerful hardware to run Vista, and many people automatically switch search off in a quest to speed up Vista, but I’d suggest giving it another go if you’re one of those people and are running anything like modern hardware.  When I go back to XP, like on the Dell, I really miss the search option.  I know there is Windows Search for XP but it just doesn’t work as well.

Hmmm, Vista on the Dell Mini 9…..I wonder……  

Posted in Vista | Print | 2 Comments »

25/08/2008 by Gavin.

GottaBeMobile - Resolve Some of Those Vista Annoyances : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums

Warner Crocker over at GBM posted a great link to a 5 page article on resolving issues with Vista.  I honestly believe Vista is dumped on by people purely out of habit or based on the sensationalist and inaccurate opinions they read on the Net.

Anyway, here’s my response below:

Great article!  Love how they’ve used Charlie Demerjian from the Inquirer as an example, as he typifies the type of journalist/blogger that is so anti Vista/MS that he’s no better than a typical forum troll, except he’s got a bigger platform to spout his FUD.

At the end of the day we’re only talking about software here, performing a task, and again the author has a telling phrase ‘An operating system is no ordinary piece of software - it’s the platform upon which a potentially limitless combination of hardware and software operates’.  I actually think it is remarkable that Vista works at all given the huge permutations of hardware out there, and let us not forget that the biggest issue Vista had from day one was hardware drivers, a situation which has improved greatly since launch.

I installed Vista 64 on an old 3500+ AMD system with a Gig of Ram and it had 5 exclamation marks in device manager.  Got the PC online and did a driver update on Windows Update and it found everything it needed.  Job done, and it ran rather well too!

Now, we know Vista doesn’t like low powered PCs.  I had it on an HTC Shift I owned for a while, and it certainly worked but wasn’t what you’d call snappy.  On my Core 2 Duo M700 or Quad Core desktop with 4Gb it flies, and this is what I’d call a normal spec now for a modern PC.

I too remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when XP was released.  It needs 2 Gig of HD space!  Don’t even bother getting this if you’ve less than 128 Mb Ram!  What goes around….

Now, I quite like Vista, and OSX for that matter.  They’re both good, modern OSs (but then I’m going back to the days of TOS on the Atari ST) and so my perspective maybe different because of living through such amazing advances in computing.  I think however, the biggest challenge facing the modern OS is where to go in the future.  Even Microsoft is confused.  They would love to rent Apps to you.  Remember the introduction of the Active Desktop on Windows 98SE?  That was the first stages of the idea of being online all the time and getting information sent to you.  If this is seen through to its logical conclusion then where is the need for a full featured OS.  Why not have the stripped down linux OS of an Eee, or a ‘dumb terminal’ approach where everything is spooled off a server.

Things are about to get very interesting I feel!

Posted in Vista, Microsoft | Print | No Comments »