Jeff Chan

Vista: Part 1

As I mentioned a few days ago, I installed and started playing around with Vista. I still do my main work on XP since I’m too lazy to move all my application data and things onto Vista. I’m just using Vista and XP interchangeably. One day Vista, the other day XP.

So far, Vista has not (yet) crashed on me. However, I’ve experienced some lag, probably due to my 768Mb of memory. I must say, Vista definitely is by far the best looking Windows operating system ever made. Microsoft probably realized they need to hire designers in the end.

There are some things I like about Vista. I’ve been playing around with the speech recognition buit-in, and it works very well. Of course, I could do the same work by using my mouse and keyboard in a less amount of time, but speech recognition comes in handy when I’m doing work and I need to look up something. I was amazed that it actually recognized by Asian accent voice.

I also like a nifty new hot key, the start bar switch key. The way you use this is very simple, hold on to the Windows key and press a number like 1. If you press Windows + 1, you’ll switch to the first application listed in your quick launch bar, and so on so forth.

Theres also a built-in screenshot program called Windows Snipping Tool, I believe. It’s a standard snap shot program with different functions like full screen shot, window shot, rectangle shot, and free-hand shot. So now, you don’t have to go press PRINT SCREEN, open up paint, and save. I guess they’ve realized what users really need.

The control panel is also really well-made. You can literally “control” everything from there. They need to fix up the navigation page a little since I had to went through over 15 pages to find speech recognition when I first installed Vista. The power control, parental control, audio control, etc is all there. The audio mixer that enables you to set different volume for each application is very nifty. So you could have your iTunes open setting the volume to fairly low as background music and do whatever you want. As the name says, it’s a mixer.

This is only part 1 of my Vista experience coverage. I want to do more coverage on Vista as I start getting familiar with it and exploring all the new things. I’ll take a screenshot tour of what I’ve covered later too. Stay tuned.