T
Tie Various
Guest
http://www.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?aid=166334
#1 A truly multithreaded explorer. In Windows XP, if you opened a file
dialog or a window that had to connect to the CD/DVD drive or to the network
the whole shell would hang while it did its thing. Not so in Windows Vista.
In Windows Vista, that all is done in a background thread. Getting around
the OS is always a very fluid experience.
#2 Wireless networking is much improved. The built in wireless networking in
XP was pretty awful. Most users ended up having to a user a kludgy or
bloated third-part wireless network manager instead. The one in Windows
Vista is not only better looking, it "just works".
#3 Incredibly good plug & play. While it is true that video driver support
for Vista at launch was spotty (and not to say "I told you so!" but...read
this article from over a year ago). The reality is that most things do work
and work extremely well. If I buy a brand new device today and plug it in,
odds are it'll work without me having to do anything. And Vista has a nice
little progress dialog that you can check to see how your new device is
working. On XP, you just got little pop up messages during every stage. And
how many times on XP did you run into something just not working when you
plugged it in with no real explanation? That won't happen on Vista. At the
very worst case, you'll be able to see where things went wrong in the
progress dialog that you can look at.
#4 More polish. Polish matters. If it didn't, we wouldn't be talking about
the iPhone all the time. A good user experience matters. Look at the
screenshot to the right here. Don't be afraid. This is one of the reasons
why Jenny Lam is my hero (her team at Microsoft really did a great job on
this). This kind of improved experience throughout the OS makes Windows
Vista much more pleasurable. While there are plenty of people who use our
software to make XP look a lot like Vista, there's no substitute for the
real thing.
#5 More information about your system. A lot of us have big giant cases
under our desk. In fact, in the age of the monitor having the USB ports, the
case is getting farther and farther away from us. So the days of being able
to simply listen to the hard drive crunching are long over. On Windows XP,
if my system was slow, I'd bring up the task manager and check CPU. And if
the CPU meter wasn't pegged then I'd go and look at the case to see if I
could hear the hard drive crunching. On Vista, the task manager will tell
you how much of your hard drive bandwidth you're using up and tell you what
process is accessing the disk.
#6 Much higher tolerance for handles. On Windows XP, if your system runs
out of handles, programs won't launch and weird things start to happen.
There's no warning message about it. Almost nobody knows what a user handle
is. On Windows XP, users would just reboot their machine. People who know
what handles know how to kill them off. I wrote an article "How to keep
Windows XP stable" that goes into this. On Windows Vista, the system seems
to do just fine with high handles so far. This means a much more stable
experience.
#7 Assessments. If you're reading this, you're probably the person who
people call with computer questions. On Windows XP, you might ask them "What
kind of computer do you have?" and the likely response was "It's a Dell." or
HP or Gateway or Toshiba or whatever. On Windows Vista, you instead ask them
what their performance index is which they can get to very easily. This
instantly lets people see how fast their computers really are.
#8 Better thumbnails. Windows Vista has "Windows Photo Gallery". But 99% of
the time I'm going through photos in Explorer. In Windows XP, my choice was
"thumbnails" which topped out at 128x128 thumbnails. In Windows Vista, I
can have them as large or small as I'd like which can make for very handy
viewing of lots of pictures at once.
#9 Better Laptop experience. In Windows XP, I didn't ever know for sure if
my laptop was really going to come back from sleep or hibernation. Some of
my laptops still run XP and it's a difference between XP and Vista I am
constantly reminded of. In Windows Vista, my PC is definitely coming back
from sleep. I know there are still people who complain, I'm not saying it's
perfect but it's a lot more reliable for me than XP was (or OS X Tiger was)
in this regard.
#10 Usability improvements. There are so many tiny touches in Windows Vista
that you won't see mentioned anywhere. For instance, in Windows Vista, if
you click on the system tray clock, you get a nice calendar dialog. By
contrast, in Windows XP, I would double-click to get the date and time
properties and it was slow (the Vista calendar pops up instantly). It's
just a nice small but useful touch. The home folder is a really nice touch
that wasn't in XP in a meaningful way
#1 A truly multithreaded explorer. In Windows XP, if you opened a file
dialog or a window that had to connect to the CD/DVD drive or to the network
the whole shell would hang while it did its thing. Not so in Windows Vista.
In Windows Vista, that all is done in a background thread. Getting around
the OS is always a very fluid experience.
#2 Wireless networking is much improved. The built in wireless networking in
XP was pretty awful. Most users ended up having to a user a kludgy or
bloated third-part wireless network manager instead. The one in Windows
Vista is not only better looking, it "just works".
#3 Incredibly good plug & play. While it is true that video driver support
for Vista at launch was spotty (and not to say "I told you so!" but...read
this article from over a year ago). The reality is that most things do work
and work extremely well. If I buy a brand new device today and plug it in,
odds are it'll work without me having to do anything. And Vista has a nice
little progress dialog that you can check to see how your new device is
working. On XP, you just got little pop up messages during every stage. And
how many times on XP did you run into something just not working when you
plugged it in with no real explanation? That won't happen on Vista. At the
very worst case, you'll be able to see where things went wrong in the
progress dialog that you can look at.
#4 More polish. Polish matters. If it didn't, we wouldn't be talking about
the iPhone all the time. A good user experience matters. Look at the
screenshot to the right here. Don't be afraid. This is one of the reasons
why Jenny Lam is my hero (her team at Microsoft really did a great job on
this). This kind of improved experience throughout the OS makes Windows
Vista much more pleasurable. While there are plenty of people who use our
software to make XP look a lot like Vista, there's no substitute for the
real thing.
#5 More information about your system. A lot of us have big giant cases
under our desk. In fact, in the age of the monitor having the USB ports, the
case is getting farther and farther away from us. So the days of being able
to simply listen to the hard drive crunching are long over. On Windows XP,
if my system was slow, I'd bring up the task manager and check CPU. And if
the CPU meter wasn't pegged then I'd go and look at the case to see if I
could hear the hard drive crunching. On Vista, the task manager will tell
you how much of your hard drive bandwidth you're using up and tell you what
process is accessing the disk.
#6 Much higher tolerance for handles. On Windows XP, if your system runs
out of handles, programs won't launch and weird things start to happen.
There's no warning message about it. Almost nobody knows what a user handle
is. On Windows XP, users would just reboot their machine. People who know
what handles know how to kill them off. I wrote an article "How to keep
Windows XP stable" that goes into this. On Windows Vista, the system seems
to do just fine with high handles so far. This means a much more stable
experience.
#7 Assessments. If you're reading this, you're probably the person who
people call with computer questions. On Windows XP, you might ask them "What
kind of computer do you have?" and the likely response was "It's a Dell." or
HP or Gateway or Toshiba or whatever. On Windows Vista, you instead ask them
what their performance index is which they can get to very easily. This
instantly lets people see how fast their computers really are.
#8 Better thumbnails. Windows Vista has "Windows Photo Gallery". But 99% of
the time I'm going through photos in Explorer. In Windows XP, my choice was
"thumbnails" which topped out at 128x128 thumbnails. In Windows Vista, I
can have them as large or small as I'd like which can make for very handy
viewing of lots of pictures at once.
#9 Better Laptop experience. In Windows XP, I didn't ever know for sure if
my laptop was really going to come back from sleep or hibernation. Some of
my laptops still run XP and it's a difference between XP and Vista I am
constantly reminded of. In Windows Vista, my PC is definitely coming back
from sleep. I know there are still people who complain, I'm not saying it's
perfect but it's a lot more reliable for me than XP was (or OS X Tiger was)
in this regard.
#10 Usability improvements. There are so many tiny touches in Windows Vista
that you won't see mentioned anywhere. For instance, in Windows Vista, if
you click on the system tray clock, you get a nice calendar dialog. By
contrast, in Windows XP, I would double-click to get the date and time
properties and it was slow (the Vista calendar pops up instantly). It's
just a nice small but useful touch. The home folder is a really nice touch
that wasn't in XP in a meaningful way
