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A few may remember that I tried Vista and Office 2007 out on my old laptop with RC1.  I wasn't very thrilled. I was hoping that the issues I found were just because it was beta software.  Well, they were.

Vista

As soon as Toshiba released the drivers for my M7 I installed them.  Everything is working.  Here are a few key items that I have fallen in love with:

  • The new tablet features.  Everything just seems smoother.  In my opinion that is the perfect upgrade.  Everything is familiar enough for those who are used to tablets, but it all works better and is more intuitive.  The input box is cleaner, my tablet switches from landscape to portrait smoother, the animations used with the pen cursor are better, everything is just better.  The office support for ink is nice too, but I'll talk about that in  a bit.
  • I really like the sidebar.  I know it's trivial, and something that has been done by others before, but I really like it.  Especially the RSS reader.
  • Common synchronized RSS feeds.  I love that IE, Sidebar RSS reader, and outlook all use the common feed provider.  On top of that, thanks to Jamie, I can now synchronize my feeds with newsgator.
  • The UI.  The usability of Vista is a large improvement. I knew everything looked a lot better, but I'm surprised at how usable it is as well. There are a few things that aren't perfect yet, but overall it is much improved.  The start menu is a good example.  If you are like me, there are a million items in your start menu.  It takes a long time to find exactly what you want to run.  I use the quick launch bar for most common stuff, but what about the items you don't use often but still have to find.  Now you can just hit the windows key and start typing.  It will search your start menu and give you a filtered list on what it finds.  Very nice.

There is some bad.  The bad for me is still focused on hibernate, suspend, and shutdown.  A lot of times this all works just fine for me, but there has been several issues.  Hanging on shutdown, not coming out of a hibernate or suspend.  These features have never worked well for me, even with XP.  I hope that someday they can get this right.

I'll post something on my impressions of Office 2007 soon.

posted on Sunday, December 10, 2006 12:20 PM
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