Laurence’s Blog

At XING on Friday I installed my (free!) copy of Windows Vista on my laptop. I was very skeptical about it, from all of the screenshots and reviews I had seen plastered about the internet I though it looked dire and most of the “new” features seemed to be poor imitations of Apple’s OSX features. How wrong I was. Even IE 7, which I thought was completely unusable when I ran it under XP, has grown on me – especially as explorer (the file browsing bit, at least) uses the same UI layout and having used it for a couple of days I find it much better than the old Windows’ UI.

One of the things which took a bit of finding was the keyboard shortcut to bring the sidebar to the front (Win+G, if you wanted to know). I read the help and searched the Microsoft Knowledge base. Eventually Google came up with a link to the answer tucked away on someone else’s blog. As it doesn’t seem to be refered to in any official documentation I can only assume that this person found it by trial and error.

The search box on the start menu is fantastic, not quite as good out-of-the-box as OpenSuSE’s or the Gnome deskbar, but a welcome addition. By installing a small .NET app, Start++, it is possible to extend the functionality and since it allows you to bind arbitary programs to commands it approaches the power of the deskbar. The only thing it lacks is the ability to display results in place from, say, a Google search. The deskbar achieved this via a plugin which used the Google API (for which you had to register for an API key, but that’s free) – I’m not sure the same would be possible with the Vista start menu.

The lack of Codec support in Windows Media Player is highly frustrating. WMP has never been able to play many of my videos, so I’ve always used something else like VLC. Unfortunately all of the media players I’ve tried (all 3 of them) have varying degrees of “issues” with Microsoft’s latest OS. I expect that they will soon fix them, but I’m impatient so I tried playing a video that I had laying around my USB Pen drive and WMP connected to the internet with the promise of downloading the codec required. Some 5 minutes later it gave up and said it couldn’t find one. I have no idea (nor do I want to know) precisely what codec the file is encoded with, all I know is that it’s a .avi and on Windows that means it opens with WMP. It would be nice if WMP could play media files.

When I home I like to sit my laptop to the right of my desktop’s TFT and use Synergy to control the former from the latter’s keyboard an mouse. The latest version of Synergy seems to work flawlessly on Vista, as testified by my writing this using it. One quirk I did discover is that when an application running with elevated privaledges is focused Synergy stops working. I assume Windows actively prevents other programs controlling the keyboard and mouse when an elevated app is focused to prevent any of these nice scripts with move the mouse to perform unwanted actions from working. I think this is a great feature, however it is somewhat annoying when wanting to use an application which has to run with elevated priviledges to work (Eclipse being the only example I’ve found to date as swt seems to throw an exception when run without elevated priviledges).

As I’ve already mentioned, IE 7 is growing on me as a browser. The only things really holding it back for me are a lack of adblock (I’ve found no sensible, free (of the beer variety) things for IE which duplicated the functionality), no find-as-you-type within pages (rectified thanks to a find as you type plugin) and mouse gestures. I did install IE7 pro which promised all of these things, and more, but it was horribly unstable and I had to remove it to be able to use IE without it falling over.

Also worthy of mention is MyExpose, which brings OSX’s expose feature to Vista. Despite all of the pleasant surprises with features which managed to far exceed my expectations, the new Win+Tab thing is just as bad I thought it was going to be. It’s actually less use than Alt+Tab, and that’s not terribly useful much of the time.

All of these “new” additions to Microsoft’s OS mean, at the moment at least, Vista is about on a par with the latest offerings from the GNU/Linux world (although Vista’s are slightly less configurable). Whether or not I continue to use it when I still have a perfectly good Linux install remains to be seen. I am sorely missing BASH and the core GNU utilities (grep, sed and friends) for processing a large volume (~40,000 lines) of data for my Neural Computing coursework.