To Vista or Not to Vista?

After a service pack, you bet!

Yesterday OneSeventeen, Sam and I went to Albuquerque's Microsoft Across America event.

Now, to be honest, we were mostly in it for the free copy of Office 2007 ("Thanks, Uncle Bill!"). However, being in charge of our respective organization's computer systems, we were more than a tiny bit interested in seeing Vista firsthand (Shhh...don't tell anybody). The betas were colorful, but the RC2 installer crashed on me completely, so faith was running a little low, at least for me.

It was absolutely hysterical how many things went wrong during the demonstrations (multiple demonstrations, multiple presenters). At one point, the guy actually said the words, "No, no, no, you dirty dog, no!" Doesn't get much better than that, eh? I guess Murphy's Law was punishing them to its fullest extent. Now to be fair, a few of the issues were not due to Vista but rather to networking and virtual machine issues. But it was still a riot!

I did see some pretty neat things, like the BitLocker. It's built-in disk-level encryption with the capacity to monitor what goes on and off the computer, and in what form (USB, CD, etc.). We are currently running two third-party apps for this purpose on our laptops. These programs are slow and clunky, but if they were built into the OS, I imagine it would work a little better.

Also, the instant search feature is amazing. No more looking for anything on your computer - at all. Click Start, type what you want in the search box, and there it is. Instantly. It looks for everything, including applications, documents, emails and favorites. For instance, if I type 'calc', the results show in the start bar, with the Calculator as the top result. Hit Enter, and I'm using the calculator. No more Start > All Programs > Accessories > Calculator. Very helpful if you've customized the start menu and can't remember where you put something.

If you and I are in a coffee shop with wireless capacity, we can start a virtual network. We can create shared workspace and open each other's documents. You are protected from other people in the coffee shop by password-protecting your virtual network. You are protected from me stealing your files by only sharing in the workspace exactly what it is you want me to see.

Ever use Yahoo Widgets? Built-in to the OS now ('Gadgets').

Assign XML tags to your files for easier searching, like del.icio.us.

Folder icons in Explorer show the contents of the folder, such as Word docs, music, pics, etc. You can also see if there are nested folders. All this without opening the folder itself.

So it looks like there's some added features that are pretty cool. Nothing we haven't seen before, but it's now all in one place as it should be. But until all the bugs are worked out, I like XP just fine.

Now for Office 2007 (you thought I was done, huh?).

Wow. Finally, everything is intuitive. The menus at the top only show options relevant to what you're working on. No more File, Edit, View, blahblahblah. Really slick, and I can say that it's already stable because I was perfectly happy with the beta version I used last year. I personally believe it's been ready that long, they were just holding it back so they could release it in tandem with Vista.

So all in all, I think Vista is an excellent catch-up effort from Microsoft, and Office 2007 is a smart step forward.