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Dante Hicks · 5 Aug 2007, 21:37

The new interface isn't that different from XP imho. The changes in conventions (e.g. making "Documents and Settings" into "Users" and simplifying the folders which sit under it) have all largely been improvements. It takes some time to get used to little things like trying to find what "Add/Remove Programs" and the like are now called, but

Things like task manager and msconfig have more features than they did previously, but on the whole I was surprised by how much stayed the same.

The interface I am not hugely impressed with, but then I'm someone who always turns off all the shiny options in XP anyway. It does seem that it adds unnecessary overhead to most tasks though - the PC I use which has Vista is reasonably new (albeit not very good) but performs about the same speed as a PC (again, not very good) which is over a year older.

What does annoy me though is that after however many versions of DOS and Windows we've had there's still so much that simply doesn't work particularly well. With somethings, there's legal/competetion issues - Microsoft could undoubtedly make mspaint infinitely better than it is, but presumably that would piss of Adboe and FTC. So that's understandable.

But even things like copying files STILL doesn't work particularly well (using Vista to upload 5MB of files to an ftp site I use takes twice as long as using a basic freeware ftp client (not because of transfer rates, Windows just seems to ponder the question for a period). Things like mass renaming or moving large numbers of files from different sources - these are all OS functions which Vista (via the GUI) still doesn't seem to perform very well at. OK, for somethings you're not going to beat a competent Unix sysadmin on a caffeine and regex bender in terms of speed, but that's not really the issue. Most of the places I know, users have responsibility for keeping things like network drives in order and MS share some of the blame for the mess that this inevitably results in.

I've not had a chance to play around with the command shell scripting so I've no idea how that performs. In terms of the basic command prompt, I know MS are making a GUI-based product with a shell thrown in but I still don't understand why there's so little improvement been made on that front since Win2K. We all know that if you're administering a Windows based machine for long enough you'll have to mess around with command prompts, so why not make it a pleasant experience? Again, the new scripting stuff might solve all that, I've no idea.

Finally, as with all MS products made in the last 10 years, there's too much emphasis on wizards and automated graphical pop-ups. I appreciate these mostly can be turned off, but it's still a chore to have to do so. And if we are going to have processes which work like that, can we have the option to save them into a human readable plain text script job which we can edit/adjust where we need to?

5 Aug 2007, 21:37	#6
Dante Hicks Clerk Join Date: Jun 2001 Posts: 13,940	Re: Oh. My. God. The new interface isn't that different from XP imho. The changes in conventions (e.g. making "Documents and Settings" into "Users" and simplifying the folders which sit under it) have all largely been improvements. It takes some time to get used to little things like trying to find what "Add/Remove Programs" and the like are now called, but Things like task manager and msconfig have more features than they did previously, but on the whole I was surprised by how much stayed the same. The interface I am not hugely impressed with, but then I'm someone who always turns off all the shiny options in XP anyway. It does seem that it adds unnecessary overhead to most tasks though - the PC I use which has Vista is reasonably new (albeit not very good) but performs about the same speed as a PC (again, not very good) which is over a year older. What does annoy me though is that after however many versions of DOS and Windows we've had there's still so much that simply doesn't work particularly well. With somethings, there's legal/competetion issues - Microsoft could undoubtedly make mspaint infinitely better than it is, but presumably that would piss of Adboe and FTC. So that's understandable. But even things like copying files STILL doesn't work particularly well (using Vista to upload 5MB of files to an ftp site I use takes twice as long as using a basic freeware ftp client (not because of transfer rates, Windows just seems to ponder the question for a period). Things like mass renaming or moving large numbers of files from different sources - these are all OS functions which Vista (via the GUI) still doesn't seem to perform very well at. OK, for somethings you're not going to beat a competent Unix sysadmin on a caffeine and regex bender in terms of speed, but that's not really the issue. Most of the places I know, users have responsibility for keeping things like network drives in order and MS share some of the blame for the mess that this inevitably results in. I've not had a chance to play around with the command shell scripting so I've no idea how that performs. In terms of the basic command prompt, I know MS are making a GUI-based product with a shell thrown in but I still don't understand why there's so little improvement been made on that front since Win2K. We all know that if you're administering a Windows based machine for long enough you'll have to mess around with command prompts, so why not make it a pleasant experience? Again, the new scripting stuff might solve all that, I've no idea. Finally, as with all MS products made in the last 10 years, there's too much emphasis on wizards and automated graphical pop-ups. I appreciate these mostly can be turned off, but it's still a chore to have to do so. And if we are going to have processes which work like that, can we have the option to save them into a human readable plain text script job which we can edit/adjust where we need to?