Vista reviewed - Part One: Installing and Getting Started.
Introduction
So finally I've got around to writing my review of Windows Vista. I'm not going to spend too much time going over stuff people already know about from other reviews, or even spend too much time repeating points made elsewhere that I totally agree with and don't have anything new to add.
I've been running Vista Business as my sole work machine since Vista RTM was announced, and running a 'test' build of 64-bit Vista Home Premium for about a month now, and my review will be based on my impressions of the RTM version of Vista.
To cut a long story short, I personally don't like Vista very much at the moment. It's very much like the proverbial Curate's Egg. While it is without a doubt the 'best Windows yet' in terms of technology included in the OS, without a doubt it is also the 'most secure Windows yet' (stop laughing) and there certainly are some very interesting features and tweaks in the new system, I find it to be rather frustrating to use on a day-to-day basis and I have grave doubts about how some parts of the new OS work, and about the overall cohesiveness of the system.
As such, I'm not convinced that Vista really represents a good overall experience for the paying customer at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future, but right now my suggestion is not to upgrade, or at least to consider alternative platforms.
Deployment
Vista's setup and installation routine has seen a lot of changes compared to the previous setup routines seen in XP and older versions of Windows.
Firstly, and most obviously, the setup routine has been upgraded to be a wholly graphical experience; text based setup mode has been dropped in favour of a new GUI based setup routine built on top of Windows PE.
Secondly, some even more important changes have been made to how setup actually goes about installing Windows. A standard Windows 'wizard' type process collects all the information required to install Windows at the start of the installation, then setup proceeds to install Windows from an image format in a way that has more in common with restoring a Ghost image than with more traditional Windows setup methods.
These changes have two important and useful results. Asking all the questions at the start of setup ensures that the user doesn't need to 'hover' over a computer quite as much during install and can get on with other things, and the image-based setup is much faster than previous Windows installation methods, which means that while the disk 'footprint' of Windows Vista is much larger than that of Windows XP it typically installs in about half the time of XP.
One bad area for installation is the upgrade process. This has been re-worked for Vista, effectively resulting in a clean install of Vista which has your previous settings and data imported into it. This sounds good, and in theory should deliver a better upgrade process for people who opt for this route to Vista, but in practice I've carried out a fair number of upgrades myself in various tests and have yet to have one single good result. I've seen a good few complaints about this on the Microsoft Vista newsgroups too, so it isn't something that I'm doing wrong.
Now I, personally, have always been wary of upgraded system. While some fare better than others, upgrades on any operating system are a bit of a crap-shoot (I recall seeing a few posts in Apple newsgroups about problems with upgrades from 10.3 to 10.4 for example), but the fact of the matter is that the majority of home users will use this method to install Vista because it appears to be the easiest route for people who are not terribly technically inclined. If these people have the same bad results that I did with upgrades then this will be a disaster for Microsoft.
Lastly, for deployment, Microsoft have worked on a new and comprehensive set of deployment tools to make customising Windows installs easier for businesses. Windows itself is far more modular than before, allowing more control and easier customisation of the install process. Very little of this is exposed to the 'average' home user, who has very little choices during setup, but as much as this grates on some of us, it probably really is the right choice for the average home user. Remember that Microsoft are not just designing for the 'best' of their user community, in terms of technical ability, but for the worse too. As ever, third parties have stepped up to help home users, so those who are keen to fiddle with home installs are not left high and dry.
Getting Started
Once setup completes another wizard appears to lead you through setting up an account, activation, etc, pretty in pretty much the same sort of way XP did. Disappointingly, the account you set up at this time will be an admin account, and at no time are you warned about the implications of this. It seems to me that it would be easy to create the user account here as a normal user account and set up a second account for admin work, or just allow local 'sudo'-type access to the administrator account. Whatever you think of how secure Windows Vista is, and whatever you think of things like UAC, there is no doubt that these security features are only improved by separating admin accounts from day-to-day user accounts.
A new part of the first login / getting started experience with Vista is the Windows Experience Index - this runs the first time you log in to Vista and indexes the performance of key parts of your system, assigning each key area a score, allowing you to quickly see which areas of your system you might want to improve first as you upgrade your system.
The idea is that you can use your overall WEI score when shopping for software to quickly see if a new item of software will run on your machine; as long as your computer's WEI equals or exceeds the WEI printed on the software box then the software should run well on your machine.
Quite a lot has been written about this already which I won't repeat here and the Windows Vista team blog has an 'official' explanation of WEI which is quite instructive. I'm not sure how well WEI will work as time goes by but it is a nice idea; whatever happens at least Microsoft are trying to improve things in this area.
With this done, probably the first thing many users will see next is the Windows Welcome Center (yes my UK English version of Windows insists on calling it a 'center'). The Welcome 'Center' contains a series of links for getting started with Vista and 'offers' from Microsoft (e.g. to subscribe to Windows Live! products, etc. The Welcome 'Center' can be turned off once you are comfortable with Vista.
With all this done, there are some obvious differences in the interface but anyone who has used Windows will be right at home. It might not say 'Start' any more but there's still a menu in the bottom right-hand corner. The bottom left corner still holds the Taskbar Notification Area (hi Raymond!) and so-on.
Vista is Sloppy!
Returning to the "UK English Vista talking about a 'Center'" thing for a moment, I'm actually going to outline one of my biggest problems with Vista at this point, because I think this admittedly quite minor thing is actually a symptom of a greater malaise within Vista.
Simply put, Windows Vista is sloppy. I don't have a problem with American English spelling, I don't see myself as the great defender of the British way of life and of spelling or any nonsense like that, but I do find being slapped around the face like this the moment I log into Vista to be an example of a sloppy lack of attention to detail that persists throughout the whole of the "Vista experience".
Windows Mail, the replacement for Outlook Express simply does not include any English spelling modules besides US English. This is 'by design' apparently, as I raised a bug about this during the beta and was told that this was just how things were going to be. Sloppy attention to detail: This shows poor attention to detail and a lack of respect for customers; the various different dialects of the English language around the world are different enough to deserve proper attention and neglecting this makes it more difficult for affected users to work easily with Vista.
Another example of sloppy work is the Internet Explorer interface. Redesigned for Vista, the layout of the new IE window totally ignores previous MS UI guidelines and is not at all customisable, making it more difficult for users to find their way around the system. Sloppy attention to detail again: While you would certainly argue that innovation is good, and consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, this redesign has moved UI elements that are frequently used
away from each other making them harder to find; moved / hidden the menu, which many people relied on as an 'anchor'; and let us not forget that the navigation buttons are now actually harder to see with the new colour scheme.
Still with IE, the 'Stop' button is live and 'clickable' whether or not there is any action taking place that can be stopped or not. In Firefox and previous IE versions this button is greyed out when the browser window is inert, and could be used as an indication of whether or not anything is still taking place in the page being viewed. Sloppy usability: Maybe not too many people used this 'feature' but for those who did, it was a important clue to what was happening in the browser, and the only possible reason I can see for abandoning it is simple lack of concentration.
Screen 'real-estate' is thrown away. On screen, Windows Vista feels far more cramped than Windows XP at the same resolution, simply because of the way windows are laid out. Vast amounts of 'white space' are used in Windows to spread everything out in an effort to make it look more attractive. In some places this succeeds and in other places it doesn't work so well, but in all cases the screen fills up much more quickly than you might expect. You'll either want to buy a very large monitor or get used to having only a couple of applications at once visible on screen. This, to me, is sloppy design because the purpose of an operating system is to allow you to work on your computer. This means accessing and manipulating information, not admiring gradient-fills and sweetly swishing curves on an open file dialogue. Mac OS X has often been criticised for this kind of thing, but I feel far less cramped on my 1268x800 MacBook with OS X 10.4 than I do running Vista on my 1268x1024 desktop rig.
It takes more work to navigate the OS. With the screen layout problem outlined above and the re-design of the control panel to include such essential features as drop-shadows on the icons and gradient filled sidebars with a cute little swish effect, it now takes more work than ever to locate something in the control panel. This is, again, sloppy UI design. If I'm in the control panel, I'm probably trying to fix something that is broken or install something new or maybe change something that isn't set up in an optimal way for what I want to do. In any of those cases, the chances are that I'm actually a lot more interested in getting on with my work than I am in admiring gradient fills and swish curve effects, let alone on spending ages trying to find the control panel setting I want. Just a thought, eh?