Well I have had Vista for 4 months now so I thought I would give it a review from a daily users perspective. I have Vista Business some I can’t comment on the Media Center and such.

The best place to start is with my favourite part of vista. Which is the Start Search on widows main Menu, this is so cool. Now if I want to run a program I don’t have to navigate though folders or list of shortcuts, I just start typing in the first few characters and the program shortcut is displayed to me. I find it difficult to go to my XP machine as I don’t want to “find locations” any more. This is not just go for application you install but also with Windows applications like Mobile center, Error Reporting ect. I am finding thing that were in XP, but so buried I didn’t know that it was there. The Aero graphic is cool but the search is by far the most useful feature about Vista that XP will never have. The Vista search is good enough for me to remove Google desktop search. Although I must also mention that when I had Google desktop on, it didn’t look like the crawler was indexing my public folders, so items in these folders were not returning with search results (Even when I set the fold in Google desktop search options). I think this has to do with Vista Security, which has been the rainy cloud on an otherwise sunny day.   

Setting programs to run in admin mode will help most application that will just stop responding. The reason being that vista has not allowed it to perform a task. Even with Visual Studios 2005 after installing the vista patch and then the update I had problems updating a web reference (this error seems to have been fix in an update). Another problem I had was with my PDA not being able to access the internet though my computer.

Some programs that run on XP though won’t run on vista at all and some won’t perform some tasks. The software that came with my laptop for burning gives a driver block error ever time my computer starts. The software still works but it is annoying having to see this message all the time.  

But all in all I still think that Vista is a good OS and I am glad I went to it from XP. I am however looking forward to future updates that fix some of the security issues (not the lack of). I think that an OS should not stop an application from running that the user knowingly wants to run. Just who is the Master here, computers should bend to the users will, not humans bending to the will of a computer.