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Vista at Risk of Being Bypassed by Businesses
narramissic writes "With Windows 7 due in late 2009 or 2010, many businesses may choose to wait it out rather than make the switch to Vista. According to some analysts, Vista uptake at this point really depends on how good Vista SP1 (due in Q1, 2008) is. If it doesn't smooth over all the problems, companies are much more likely to stick with XP. And that holds especially true for those businesses that follow the every-other-release rule." Note for Microsoft: Allow us to natively disable trackpads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
Shell & User interface
[edit] Windows Aero
Windows Vista uses the Windows Aero graphical user interface.
Windows Vista uses the Windows Aero graphical user interface.
Main article: Windows Aero
Premium editions of Windows Vista include a redesigned user interface and visual style, named Windows Aero (Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open). Aero is intended to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than previous Windows versions, including glass-like transparencies, window animations and eye candy. Windows Aero also features a new default font (Segoe UI) with a slightly larger size, a streamlined style for wizards, and a change in the tone and phrasing of most of the dialogs and control panels.
In addition to the Windows Aero visual style, Windows Vista includes a "Windows Vista Basic" theme which does not use desktop composition, and is geared towards lower-end machines that are not able to use the Desktop Window Manager, and the "Windows Classic" and "Windows Standard" themes which are similar to the classic themes in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows Aero is not available in Windows Vista Home Basic and Starter editions, although the Desktop Window Manager is included in Windows Vista Home Basic.
[edit] Windows Explorer
Main article: Windows Explorer
[edit] Layout and visualization
A typical Windows Explorer window showing the Navigation Pane to the left, the Properties Pane at the bottom.
A typical Windows Explorer window showing the Navigation Pane to the left, the Properties Pane at the bottom.
Windows Explorer's task pane has been removed, integrating the relevant task options into the toolbar. A Favorites pane on the left contains commonly accessed folders and prepopulated Search Folders. Seven different views are available to view files and folders, namely, List, Details, Small icons, Medium icons, Large icons, Extra large icons or Tiles. File and folder actions such as Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Delete, Rename and Properties are built into a dropdown menu which appears when the Organize button is clicked. It is also possible to change the layout of the Explorer window by using the Organize button. Users can select whether to display Classic Menus, a Search Pane, a Preview Pane, a Reading Pane, and/or the Navigation Pane. Document Properties are available from the common 'Open' and 'Save' dialog boxes, so it is easier to add metadata (such as author or subject) to a document. The metadata can be viewed and edited in the Properties Pane that shows up at the bottom of an Explorer window. The Navigation Pane contains a list of most common folders (the Favorites) for quick navigation. It can also show the folder layout of the entire hard drive or a subset of it. It can contain both real folders as well as virtual ones. By default it contains a links to folders such as Documents and the publicly shared folder, as well as virtual folders that search and present the saved virtual folders and that lists the recently changed documents. The Preview Pane can be used to preview the contents of a document, including viewing pictures in a size larger than the thumbnails shown in the folder listing, and sampling contents of a media file, without opening any additional program. Explorer can show a preview for any image format if the necessary codec authored using the Windows Imaging Component installed. Also, if an application installs proper handlers for the preview pane (like Office 2007 does), then the documents can be edited in the preview pane itself.[1]
Windows Explorer also contains modifications in the visualization of files on a computer. A new addition to Windows Explorer is the Details pane, which displays metadata and information relating to the currently selected file or folder. The Details pane will also display a graphical thumbn
Wow! You mean eye candy that slows down your system and hogs resources is the best thing you can come up with for why people should upgrade to Vista?
Yet it's touted as a feature for OS X.
At least on Windows you can turn off the bloated eye candy.
Really though, if you don't like it, don't upgrade. If the worst that can be said about Vista is that the previous version of Windows was good enough, then that's not too bad, it just means that XP was good enough and doesn't need fixing. Strangely though, some people to think that Vista not offering some radical new feature means that niche platforms are suddenly better.