Well I now have had Windows XP installed for the last few days or so and while I don’t regret switching back; especially as I can now do the one thing that Vista wasn’t letting me do - that being move or copy large video files across my home network, there are some features in Vista that I miss. The thing about Vista is that as cool as they made things like Areo and DreamScape sound it was the little things that made it a good upgrade from XP and as it turns out some of the stuff I miss the most.

For example as useless as I considered the Sidebar to be now that I don’t have it I consistently find myself looking to the second monitor and for the calendar or clock that were standard issue for it. The other thing I find I am missing and being a little more on the functional side of things is the screen shot widget that I used a lot. now I am going to have to sort through the free alternatives that are out there to replace it with.

As well I gave Windows Explorer a lot of flack over it not being able to apparently remember its screen position between uses and nor did it seem to like remember its viewing styles. Even here though there were a couple of the little things that I liked about using it and miss on XP. The first as silly as it sounds is that you can create a new folder from the tree view (left pane) display of the folders instead of always having to do it from the listing view. The one other thing that I liked as well was when you selected to rename a file it would only highlight the part of the file name up the the file extension.

While both of those things may not seem all that earth shattering as far as improvements go they are what I would call incremental productivity improvements which we can all use.

As far as aesthetics go I do miss the vastly improved look of the icons especially for the desktop. No longer do the desktop icons look like crap at any resolution above 48 x 48 pixels.

The one feature which a lot of other folks have mentioned in reviews of Vista that they liked was the revamped Start Menu with it’s built-in search. Personally I never used the feature to any great extent but from the times I did I have to agree it can be quite a time saver when looking for stuff like files and programs.

One other improvement that folks who like to keep on top of what is running or how the system is performing will like the what has been done to the venerable Task Manager. A big complaint in previous versions of Windows and Task Manager has been the generic fashion in which it reports what programs and processes are running. With the improved Task Manager it now displays active system processes in more of a plain English manner. This may not seem like a lot but between this improvement and others system info junkies will definitely like what they see.

There are definitely a lot more of these types of user oriented improvements to go along with the ones you don’t see but for for me and my experience with Vista it definitely is the little things when added together that made the OS enjoyable to work with. Which by the way I still like as an upgrade for XP and would still be using if it wasn’t for the one major problem I had with it. Does this make it worth the prices being asked for if you are looking for anything above the Home Pro version?

My answer for that would have to be a definite no. For the average user looking to upgrade to Vista I don’t see anything that the other editions of Vista make it worth spending the a small fortune for. That said and because of the problems I have had I would also suggest waiting until the service pack Microsoft is testing for Vista is available before even thinking of upgrading from XP.

Listening to: Air - Moon Safari - La Femme D’Argent

Conversation Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Vista, XP