Jeff Chan

Vista: Part 2 Screenshots

Screenshots to the Vista: Part 2.

New Vista start menu. I love it.

Paint will always be superior than Photoshop!

Say goodbye to the My’s.

Not many new functionality, but photo gallery does what it needs to do.

The desktop now gets its own spot in Alt-Tab!

 Topics: screenshots, Tech, vista

Vista: Part 2

This is the second part of my Vista series. You can check out Part 1 and the screenshots.

The very first thing you’ll probably notice when you first boot up your Vista is the new start menu and start bar. The new start bar takes out the word “start”, so I’m not even sure if I should call it “Start” or not (:D). There’s not much change to the start bar, except for the new icons, which Brad says it looks ugly. As for the start menu, when you click that Windows icon at the botton, you’ll notice a little text box just above the icon. It’s the Windows search. Just like Spotlight on the Mac, this search let’s you do real time searches in which results will return in one or two seconds. Whether you are searching for a file or an application, it comes in very handy. When you click on “All Programs”, menus no longer extend out. Instead, it just make use of the existing column. As I hover over the different links on the right, you can see that the icon changes. Pretty cool. I must say I like the new search and the new way of browsing applications.

You can’t talk about Windows without even mentioning Paint. In this edition of Windows, Microsoft polished Paint a little bit by making the icons look better. I don’t see any other significant new feature or change. Microsoft is still keeping it simple.

Windows Explorer in Vista has a new take on file browsing on the PC. Unlike XP with the annoying and irrelevant sidebar, when you open up Windows Explorer, you get the file tree right away. They put the main functions you need on the top right below the breadcrumbs. You also should notice that there is no “my” anymore. Yes, you heard it right. No more “My Computer” and “My Documents”, it’s just “Computer” and “Documents”, thank god. I think the Windows Explorer in Vista gets to the point. New way of organizing your files, or in other words, a new file structure is very helpful. I am at the same time celebrating the extinction of the stupid my’s.

The image viewer from XP is now called Photo Gallery on Vista. Basic controls like slide show and rotation are still there. There are a few buttons at the top such as Burn to CD and Make a Movie. I’ve yet to try out the new Fix function which is suppose to fix and adjust your photo.

Finally, it’s the small tweaks that developers do that I love. This new tweak is an addition to the common used Alt-Tab. If you don’t know what this key combination does, it’s basically a shortcut to switching your windows. How many times have you tried to go to the desktop on XP by pressing Alt-Tab. I have, and it doesn’t work, sadly. Thanks to the developers who probably have the same problem, you can now switch to your desktop with the Alt-Tab shortcut.

The screenshot post of this part will follow. Check back!

 Topics: Tech, vista

Vista: Part 1 Screenshots

Screenshots to the Vista: Part 1.

How much RAM used right after Windows Vista boots.

Speech recognition! Neat!

Thanks to this snipping tool, screenshot taking just got 200% easier.

Newly designed visual interface of the control panel.

Example of a control panel page. Lots of new customization.

I love this audio mixer!

Vista: Part 2 is to come soon!

 Topics: screenshots, Tech, vista

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.

 Topics: Tech, vista

Viissttaaaa

I installed Vista on my computer a few days ago. Things went pretty well, except not Aero Glass for me, and Vista uses TON of RAM.

Here’s a screenshot of my desktop. I’ll post more about my Vista experience later .

 Topics: Tech, vista