Vista Rocks!!!
And so does IE 7 and Office 12.....
I am ashamed to admit that even though I work in Microsoft I never tried out the cool new products. Being a bit low on bug-count I decided to try out Vista (a.k.a. longhorn). I tried ugrading one of the not-so-high-end boxes (3GHz, 1GB ram) to Vista from WinXP. The installation went through smoothly without any glitches and after some time I was the proud owner of a Vista desktop :).
Within couple of hours of fidling around I was super-happy with what I saw. Not only the UI has become sooooo cool the functionality is simply awsome. I loved the new metallic (??) progress bar. I loved the integrated search. I genereally navigate using keyboards. I loved the fact that I could hit the Win key and directly type the name of the program I was looking for. I typed winword and it showed me MS Word as well as all emails and files containing those words.
Vista is way ahead in security, with various security plugins in IE and Windows-defender turned on. The system was very stable and I decided to push my luck harder and went ahead with installing Office 12. This simply blew my mind off. The coolest features I hit upon is that your callender, upcoming appointments and pending emails are visible in the main email window of Outlook. The new formatting-preview of Word, where you hover you mouse on the font size and word shows how the text'd look with the formatting applied was also nice.
Vista also fixes the old allegation on Windows that you need to go to Start to shut-down. Now there is no text on the Start button. On the default theme its just a round button....
Right now I am writing this blog in IE7 running on Vista. All in all I was very impressed and plan to shift to Vista as my primary OS over the next few weeks....
