The Vista Switch

I have eased into Vista over the last couple of months.  I had too many critical programs on my old system to risk an upgrade.  I had my data backed up, but I could not risk the chance of some of my applications would not be able to handle the upgrade.

I did a fresh install on a machine with 2 GB of RAM.  I moved my good video card over with both of my monitors.  So far I have had very few problems, but there is one thing I can’t solve.  I can’t get VNC to wake my machine up if the screen is locked.  I run VNC and Hamachi on all my computers.  The free version of RealVNC (my favorite flavor) isn’t compatible with Vista.  I tried Ultr@VNC and it worked until my password protected screen saver kicked in.  Once that happens, there is no response from Vista.  I don’t have hibernate turned on, but the screen password seems to kick the machine into a different video mode that cuts the VNC connection.

There are some huge positives in my short Vista experience.  I love the Start menu.  I click the Windows-Key and a letter or two of the program I want to start and Vista finds it.  It does the same with documents.  Actually, it works with anything.

I do a lot of file renaming.  F2 still does the trick, but Vista doesn’t automatically highlight the file extension.  If I rename a file, the OS assumes I still want those last three letters to remain the same.  It takes an extra click to highlight the extension to change it (which I rarely do).  This is more efficient for me about 99.44% of the time.

I use the Sidebar with a few widgets.  I like the quick loading calendar that pops up with Windows-Space Bar.

The snipping tool is great for quick screen captures. 

The user directories are much better.  Everything is in a folder called “users” instead of “documents and settings” (what a dumb name).  All the “my” prefixes are gone too.  Now it’s “Documents”, “Pictures” and “Videos” instead of “My Documents”, “My Pictures” and “My Videos”.  Vista also included a “Downloads” folder.  This is something I have manually created on all my computers for years.  Where else would anyone store downloaded programs?  Finally it is built in and pre-programmed to communicate with applications that download files.

The “User Access Control” isn’t nearly as bad as the Apple commercial would have you believe.  I get beeped once a day at most.  As I get my machine tweaked, I will hardly see it at all.