Microsoft's Dumbest And Smartest Moves Of 2011

[stefcep2]

Computer! Tea.  Earl Grey.  Hot.

[stefcep2]

@Duce.

Clearly Vista hasn't worked for you.

But I'm curious as to which Vista beast you used.  I can't prove it but my experience with a massive number of PC's ie the one desktop and two laptops I have at home suggest that Vista Business is leaner, meaner, faster and more stable than Vista Home premium.  It lacks Mediacentre so I'm sure this has something to do with it.

 I dual boot the desktop a 2007 vintage Athlon X2 5000 with 2 gb RAM with Vista Business and XP and the performance difference is marginal.  My son has a core2duo laptop with 2 gig ram again about 4 years old.

 I set up a dual boot with XP Pro and Vista Business for him, but again, XP' s was marginally quicker.  We took XP off it since there was no compelling reason to keep it.

The one noticeable thing is that Vista seems to thrash the hard drive more than XP and Win 7.  But IMO it is the best looking OS Microsoft has ever produced.

One thing I credit Vista for is that it has changed in a fundamental the way people use their PC:  most users (not so much fanatics or geeks) I see no longer bother with launching and finding items pinned to the start menu, or opening window after window but rather Start-->Search-->type a few letters, and indexing does the rest.  This is quite a paradigm shift and is not lost on Microsoft, where it intends to have this as one of two ways to navigate Win 8.  You don't need to know the file system layout, just some of the name of what you want, and there it is.  Every bit as big an innovation as the Start button was in 1995.

[stefcep2]

Vista worked, and worked well enough to use on my daily driver PC's after SP's arrived.  Entirely usable for the most part, but in comparison to 7 still a complete pig to me.  If all a person had ever used was Vista, one would be none the wiser.  

I've got Win 7 on my work laptop, a HP C2D with 4 gig (but its only 32 bit).  Yes it boots faster than Vista Business, shut down is about the same, by about 5-7 seconds and in general use, Win 7 feels "snappier".  Stability is the same.  But here's the thingOver time Vista has actually got FASTER and more stable, but I have Vista Business fully up to date, and applied some of the registry tweeks, and this has sped it up significantly.  

I think on release, Vista was half baked with its driver support, and  many people that bought it had gigs of crapware installed like my HP laptop did.  So when people got their PC, Vista would rummage through the hard drive building its index.  Now if you had just come from XP, the constant indexing would have made the machine seem unusable.  MS should have just told people turn on your Vista PC, leave it alone for a day or two, and then it will be much faster.  Yep, I know, pretty crappy thing to say, but better than people downgrading to XP without giving Vista a chance.

Used all variations of it, 32 and 64 bit.  Tbh, not sure I ever used the search functions of Vista or 7 much.  I'm a bit particular about how I do things I suppose, and fell into habits 20 years ago I still use today, heh.  I use the Start Menu and quick launch functions almost exclusively when mousing around, but for the most part I just have programs bound to G keys on my systems.

I don't know and no longer want to know where everything is kept, so I too now just use the search.  Most of the people I work with are Gen Y and they all work with the search.  Its fast, and I don't have to think "Now where is xyz?"

[stefcep2]

Lately I've been using this cool new thing they just invented in the 1970s called a hierarchical file system, it's kind of like searching to find what I want, only there's no delays while the search happens and I can organize everything to my exact preference instead of having to rely on the computer to do it for me!

But thats the point: a user doesn't have to know anything about the file system to use it just as effectively

Also, there are files eg system files/preferences that you can't organise wherever you want but need to delve deep to find, sometimes several folders deep. Sometimes you know what it does, what might be its name, but not sure where it lives.  In that situation, I bet an indexed Vista/Win7 will get me there faster than you will clicking through folder, guessing where the file might be.

For your own files, sure you can be anal and organise every file into specific folders, and you can have short cuts and pin them here and there, like I once did, but now i can't be arsed.

Indexed search is an incredibly useful too, the most useful thing that happened going from XP to Vista IMO.

[stefcep2]

I expect not; the important arcane-wizardry files are really not that hard to find in Windows. System components in (Windows directory)\system32, application preferences in Documents and Settings\(user | All Users)\Application Data, etc. The few that are really hidden deep are corner-cases; I'd imagine the time saved on finding everything else in a well-organized system more than pays off against waiting for the search routine to do heuristically what you could have done intelligently from the get-go.

What wait?   A few hours after installation letting the OS index everything, and the odd hard drive light blink to keep the index up to date is all there is and everything is indexed. finding things after that is virtually instantaneous. And I don't need to know a damn about where any of it is kept, ever.  Why should I remember where defrag is, or where computer management lives, when I can just type up defra in search and its there instantly?

Sure i'll save my stuff in documents/photos/videos/music, but these folders get too big and so I'll go and create subfolders for letters, bill receipts, pdf's, but then I might want to keep documents from a particular source eg bank statements, school newsletters, government taxes, and then it would be helpful to separate then into years...but accessing them later?  Why rummage through folder after folder, or keep a mess of shortcuts, or pinned files when all I need to do is Start-->search?

Anyway thats my view if you're happy with the old way, more power to you.