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Windows Vista Review - Part 3

by Mukul Dharwadkar — last modified 2006-10-06 13:29

I let Windows Vista loose in my home environment with everyone from my 2 year old son to my parents using it regularly for their browsing. I kept a close watch on the performance, behaviour of Vista looking out for applications. Here's what I found out.

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Applications!! That's the key to success for any operating system. No matter how stable, secure and feature rich your operating system is, if there are not many applications running on it, then it has no chance of succeeding in the bigger market. Geek market? Yeah sure, geeks will play around with it and love it, but for Joe User, it will have no intrinsic value.

For me, the Joe Users are my parents (who are not very computer savvy, I would add) Application issues on Vistaand my two year old son, who's taking his first steps in computers. For them it doesn't matter if the operating system is as secure as a screen door, the only thing they need are their applications and games to run on the computer and which really having to work very hard. For them, I have tried to make it as easy as I could. But Windows Vista still behaves cranky when I try to install my son's Reader Rabbit learning system games on it. Unlike in beta 2 where Windows Vista outright refused to run the game, RC1 is better in the sense that it install correctly and runs the game, but it does not remember that it has that game installed, when I shut down the game and restart it. It agains asks me to install the game.

However, on clicking on Run SETUP.EXE it runs the game normally. But why does it have to ask to run SETUP all over again? At this point, I have no clues as to what is causing that behaviour, but I believe it has something to do with the UAC and lock down of the OS. I can figure these things out, but should I expect my wife also to figure out these things? I don't think so. The major platform for Microsoft for selling their new products is the user experience and this is not the kind of user experience I would want my users to have.

About my parents, they are perfectly happy as long as the internet works and their browser works. They only need to read news on the web on http://www.esakal.com and they don't need anything. So at least that part is taken care of and with Vista's cool new networking features like self discovery, connections and healing, it works just fine for them.

The other things I tested out is the photos. The new Microsoft Office Picture Manager software that is packaged with Office 2007 is a cut above the previous versions of Microsoft Photo Editor and I can do much more with it and that too easily. However, I tried Google's Picasa and liked it very much. I have installed and made it the default picture handler for me on Windows Vista. But still Windows refuses to recognise / remember this fact and I don't think people are going to be amused by this.

I am yet to try VPN software on Windows Vista as I don't have time to do that and my other computers running Windows XP are always availble for me, so it's not an urgent thing for me. But I think I should do it, just to satisfy my curiousity.
 

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