There's a lot of BS out in the world about Windows Vista, an article titled Dim Vista on Forbes caught my eye.
Now this is more an opinionated almost fanboyish rant than a factual article but the author does seem to have more than a few things wrong, plain and simple.
new features, many filched shamelessly from Apple's Macintosh.
I've covered this at length so many times before, its simply false. I suggest you don't go around listening to Steve Jobs, and go view some PDC videos from say 2003, or even go and look at Windows XP and check out the "indexing service".
Windows Firewall will not stop it from making outbound Internet connections to do its evil deeds.
Wrong. The Windows Firewall in Windows Vista can indeed block outbound connections:
Control Panel options have been totally rejiggered yet again for no apparent reason. You can still use the Classic panel view
Category view in Windows XP was extremely poor and nobody I know used it. Windows Vista's is usable now in both views, and in my opinion its the best Control Panel in any OS to date.
The new desktop search features are a mess, thanks in part to inscrutable indexing defaults and options. A "quick search" panel at the bottom of the Start menu lets you find results whether in a file's name or its contents. But on one machine--oddly
Indexing defaults are great, they'll search your stuff in your user folders.
I also recommend you *think* before you start spouting this sort of stuff. Say you're on a network with one hundred computers, no make that ten thousand computers. One person hits Start and presses a letter on their keyboard, what happens? The machine goes out to every computer on the network with that search request. Nice one that's a sure way to hammer the network.
You talk up the Mac so much and fail to mention the Mac can't do this, it can't do fast network searches at all. But guess what Windows Vista can do this, in a sensible fashion, it'll search network locations if you tell it to search network locations.
You can also save your search so you can easily, with only two clicks search on the network, on the machine you want, on the share and even the folder. Do all that with two mouse clicks.
The bare-bones word processor WordPad used to be able to open Microsoft Word files. No more. What possible rationale could there be for "fixing" that, except to force users to shell out for the real thing?
Partly true, but WordPad does still open Word's .doc files. You can also download the Word Viewer for free from Microsoft's website. So even if you were right, you're still wrong. But yes you can't edit Word files directly in Wordpad.
Many touted improvements, like the Web browser and media player, have been available for XP for months.
Yeah Microsoft should of kept those things for Windows Vista only, then you'd be saying Microsoft screw people over by forcing them to upgrade to Windows Vista.
One minor winner is Vista-only: file lists that update their contents automatically. You no longer have to hit View and Refresh to see files added since you last opened the list window. Macs, of course, have done this for years.
So has Windows, since what Windows 95?
The new Mac-like ability to show thumbnails
Even Windows XP's thumbnail view blows the Macintosh away. One of the biggest things that hits Windows users switching to the Mac is the sudden loss of thumbnails for all their media, especially when its in folders.
Should you upgrade your current machine? Are you nuts? Upgrading is almost always a royal pain. Many older boxes are too wimpy for Vista
That's flat out wrong. I've been running Vista on two machines that are three years old and a low-end mobile machine which is two years old, they run better than Windows XP. Catherine runs Windows Vista on her machine which is three years old technology wise, again with no performance issues.
*Sigh* what do you have to do to get some balanced reporting these days?