Vista Build 5308
February 25, 2006
I got around to installing the new vista 5308 build today so I figured I’d just share some of my thoughts. They’re only brief but I dare say I’ll write something out in full over the next week or so.
What immediately struck me immediately wasthe greatly reduced installation time when compared with previous builds (20 minutes compared to an hour or more). Upon logging in I immediately found that nearly all of my hardware was detected automatically (which is something I’m not used to with windows!) and so I immediately started up IE7 (I’ve not used it yet) so could play with it.
IE7
I have to say all in all my IE7 experience was very much lacking. The interface isn’t particularly intuitive and whilst browsing multiple sites everything just felt… awkward for want of a better word. Of course the biggest flaw for me was still the lack of standards support because for me, a good browser is one which adheres to standards and as such can display websites in the manner they’re intended. Whilst general CSS support has improved greatly and many of the pet hates I had for the browser have been remedied there are still a myriad of css and markup issues which prevent it from really shining as a browser. All that considered I have to admit that in terms of security it’s a MASSIVE improvement and some of the features it employs are fairly unique and do provide internet novices that much needed extra layer of protection.
Explorer
I was expecting explorer to be a much more useful tool since it’s been overhauled and features all of the new searching capability and “smart folders” that I’ve grown so accustomed to in Tiger. What I was greeted with however was something that felt altogether “cluttered”. The regular list view was present as always complete with the sidebar and the search field was placed in the top right which is nice and convenient. But then there are a whole array of additional buttons placed along various toolbars and until you click them to view the drop down menu’s it’s a struggle to understand what they actually do! Despite that it’s still a substantial improvement over the XP explorer and the searches were extremely fast on my AMD64 3800 with 2gb of ram. I do think however that anyone new to computers or even just new to vista might find it a little daunting at first though after using it for a few hours it got easier.
I don’t really want to cover anymore at this point since I haven’t really played that much with any of the other features but thus far it’s a definite improvement over XP but it certainly won’t drag me away from my iMac with Tiger (despite only using OS X as my primary OS for 2 months).
Feedback?
If you’ve found errors or have some feedback please . Comments aren’t currently enabled due to spam but I’m sure they’ll return in the future.