News & Reviews
First Impressions
I'm sure you've heard a lot about Vista, possibly not much of it
good. I'm running Vista Business here on a Toshiba notebook with an
Intel 1.66GHz dual core processor and 2Gb RAM, not exactly the
fastest machine around but certainly no slouch.
Most of the time it works just fine. Just occasionally, it seems
to go into 'slow' mode; just seems to sit there for 10-15 seconds,
then carries on as if nothing was wrong. In the 3 months or so I've
been running it, It's locked up on me twice, but bear in mind that
it doesn't get treated with a lot of respect. End of the day, and
between meetings and all the other non-PC tasks in the day, the lid
gets closed and it goes into hibernation. Full Shut Down/Re-boot?
Well, that's probably happened about 10 times in the 3 months of
use.
Other problems - it's not the most reliable when using it in dual
monitor mode, the external monitor dropping out on 3 occasions out
of 20-30 presentations I've run. This is a known problem and there
is apparently a fix in Service Pack 1. Most of the software I run is
Microsoft, so it would be reasonable to assume that would work OK on
Vista, and it does. I run the UK version of QuickBooks 2006, and had
a problem with that, but a call to Intuit, and they shipped an update
to me. QuickBooks still one or two minor glitches, but generally it's
fine.
I also run a few odd audio and graphics packages. Audacity, CDEx
and The GIMP all seem to run fine, and after downloading an update
from the Fuji website, my camera software is running smoothly.
Service Pack 1 is due to be release in the 1st quarter of 2008,
and apart from the dual monitor fix mentioned above, seems to be
primarily focussed on improvements to the reliability and
performance. One thing I'm assured will not be in SP1 is any change
to UAC (User Access Control, which stops mere users from installing
anything on the PC), despite cries from many Vista adopters.
When I talk about Office 2007 here, I'm talking about the
applications sold as Office Professional, i.e. Access, Excel,
Outlook, PowerPoint and Word. The other applications in the Office
family haven't changed in the same way as these. So what are these
changes? The major change you'll find is in the user interface,
where the menus and toolbars have been replaced in the main by a
Ribbon.
To understand why this change was necessary, we have to look at
how these applications have changed over the years. Taking Word as
an example, Version 1 had a menu with 7 top level items and 50
commands in these menus, plus 2 (fairly sparsely populated)
toolbars. Word 2003 had 9 top level items and over 270 commands,
plus 31 toolbars and 19 task panes (first introduced in Office
2002).
For people who do the same tasks with the applications day after
day this wasn't a problem. The problems surfaced when the
requirement was to do something new. Just where in the 270+ commands
is the one that's required?
The way that Office 2007 approached this through the Ribbon, is
to ensure that any commands that are not appropriate are simply not
available, which to me makes total sense. For example, if you are
not in a table, why would you need to have the ability to format it?
Each ribbon is selected by a tab, there being just 7 tabs
available by default. When circumstances dictate, additional tabs
appear, like the Table tab when in a table, or the Picture tab when
a picture is selected. The result is a much cleaner, less cluttered,
interface.
Having now run over 20 conversion courses, I can confirm that the
general response is favourable. On a few occasions I've been asked
how to perform a task I've not used before, and in every case it's
taken less than 30 seconds to find it. On one occasion I even used
the standard trainer's response of 'Where do you think it would be?'
with just as quick result.
The apps do seem to freeze for a few seconds sometimes, but how
much of this is due to Vista (see the Vista review above) I don't
know.
Would I recommend upgrading? Certainly - no question. I now hate
having to go back to 2003 and (worse still) 2002 for my day-to-day
work.