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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Monday, March 05, 2007

Speaking the truth about Vista

And out of a sea of fear and ignorance comes a Vista overview from someone in the Mac community not afraid to say, hey, Vista isn't all that horrible. Glenn Fleishman in TidBITS:

I just bought a new laptop with Windows Vista preinstalled, and, hey, I kinda like it.

I'm a technology journalist, and Vista is destined to be the world's dominant platform within a year or two. I need to know how it works and how to use it.

My early experience with Vista, spending not more than a couple hours getting it set up and running, wasn't terrible.

There are some nice features, many of them familiar to me as a long-time Mac OS X user, but I don't find it offensive or confusing. The Aero interface, which offers translucency among other features, is attractive. Vista, so far, is just fine.

I do have some quibbles with his overview, however.

- Upgrading from XP is not "a sucker's bet." Sure, there are always some issues with upgrading, but Vista handles this far better than previous Windows versions and includes a wonderful Upgrade Advisor that lets you know in advance how it's going to go.

- He says that User Account Control asked about granting approval for programs more than he'd like. "It's weird that I can't easily say, hey, I trust this action for this particular program," he writes. Except that when malware gets on your system and does something you don't like with that application you trust so much, it would be even weirder. Trust in security goes far deeper than the application level.

- He seems to agree that Vista is basically XP with "fancier dressing" and glosses over low-level changes. These are the types of things Apple regularly promotes as it releases minor OS X update after minor OS X update and then sells them as major upgrades. I'm not attacking him: For all I know, he calls Apple out on this with each OS X release, too. I'm guessing that's not the case, however.

Anyway, overall, a fair overview from the Mac crowd. Anything is possible, I guess. Heck, maybe we'll even find a Windows guy that likes Mac OS X.

Labels: Vista

[ Posted at 2:34 PM | Permalink ]