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.
Andrew Mumby | 25-Mar-07 at 4:15 pm | Permalink
Pretty much the first thing I downloaded after I got Vista installed was the codec pack found at http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=66826
I’ve not yet run into anything that those can’t play, and it all seems to work fine, which is more than can be said for other codec bundles.
Laurence | 25-Mar-07 at 9:15 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the heads up, Andrew. That looks like it’ll be increadably useful (it’s downloading now). The only problem I forsee is “FLAC audio will crash Windows Media Player” as most of my music is encoded as FLAC, however I’ve also grabbed the copy of MPC liked to on that forum post and hopefully that’ll cope.
Taz | 03-Apr-07 at 6:51 am | Permalink
Few comments:
Best codec pack (and 64bit supported now too) is K-Lite Codec Pack. Comes with heaps of codecs, i’ve never had an issue with codecs i need. Never
A flaw i have found with vista search is by default it doesn’t index your hard drive or programs properly. It’s not as cool as spotlight in finding apps that may not immediately be in the start menu. You have to adjust the settings.
Synergy is awesome, i just started using it at work with my work desktop and laptop. I intend to try it out on Vista seeing as googling ’synergy windows vista’ lead me here to a nice confirmation that it works. I’m assuming it’ll run on 64bit, we’ll see.
I don’t see how IE7 can grow on you as a browser. It’s disgusting, the look and the feel – it’s still lacking features. Let alone proper page rendering and following standards.
I wouldn’t call it completely ‘on par’. It’s XP with bug fixes and a nicer GUI. Take Beryl for example with multi-desktops with the cube(or wall), nicer fading. Transparency doesn’t exist to the same level on Vista either.
Something that overall shits me with Vista (and IE7 too) is the lack of proper File menus, unless you turn it on.
However, on a positive note of Vista
I like it on my desktop, now that it’s running native 64bit dual core – it actually uses the machine. The speed increase (while it uses 46% of 2 gigs RAM at idle state) was fantastic. A lot of that would be GUI and the use of gfx, while also nicer threading to the CPU, dual-core and of course 64bit.
I’m disappointed that the new file system they originally promised didn’t come. Nor did the awesome idea of quick-booting on laptops to have your app already up without loading a full vista session. I think it does sort of exist, i stumbled across something that may be it but not really clear.
Damen | 24-Apr-07 at 7:39 pm | Permalink
Synergy does not seem to work with 64-bit Vista Enterprise.
Let me know if you see otherwise!
Damen | 27-Apr-07 at 5:44 pm | Permalink
I can’t seem to get it working on 32-bit Vista Enterprise either!
Laurence | 11-May-07 at 11:28 am | Permalink
It still appears to work flawlessly on my 32-bit Ultimate install – I have yet to get around to fixing my desktop (faulty hdd) in order to install the 64-bit version of Vista.
Blinded By Tech » Synergy: multiple PCs and displays, one keyboard and mouse. | 01-Jun-07 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
[...] Mac has something similar, called Teleport, which actually works better, but only works on Macs. I don’t think Teleport and Synergy are compatible. While there is a Mac version of Synergy available, it’s not fully supported yet. Synergy works on most modern versions of Linux, as well as most versions of Windows, though it has this caveat for Vista: “…when an application running with elevated [privileges] is focused Synergy stops working.” [...]
Mike | 23-Jun-07 at 6:21 am | Permalink
A little late behind the curve here, but if you’d like to stop the ‘annoying’ popups that disable Synergy, you can turn off user access control (UAC) using the Control Panel. Directions here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-user-account-control-uac-the-easy-way-on-windows-vista/
Matt | 05-Jul-07 at 12:15 pm | Permalink
I have Synergy 1.3.1 running on 64-bit Vista Enterprise but once elivated access is required it stops functioning. Also I have found that you have to be logged in for it to work as well.
Warren | 09-Jul-07 at 6:23 am | Permalink
I believe I have found your answer to synergy refusing to run when an elevated app is running. Simply right clicking on the Synergy icon on the desktop and clicking “Run as administrator” forces Synergy to run with elevated priviledges and as such the keyboard / mouse will still work when an elevated priviledge app is focused.
Just thought I’d give you a heads up on that one.
Steve Richards | 10-Jul-07 at 8:36 pm | Permalink
Hi, well it seems to be working for me. Here’s what I did.
I installed it outside of program files, ie in my data area
I punched a hole through the firewalls explicitly.
Not sure if either of these actually fixed it, but it seems to be working now on Vista Ultimate 64.
Steve
draghn | 22-Dec-07 at 11:30 pm | Permalink
Synergy worked when run as administrator from xp – vista as desired only after I copied and pasted the folder from Program Files to another place. Before that only the test mode worked.