This week has seen the arrival Karl’s Microsoft Action Pack update with Vista and Office 2007 in it. So on it goes to my system! My motive was at the end of the day I have to learn these for work as I support them, so I might as well get on with it.
Vista

I had installed and played with betas previously, and was far from impressed. I am, how ever, very impressed with the final release.

Some things that have impressed me or made go “ooo cool” while sat here clicking away:

• Firstly, as it installed, I barely had to click on anything. Nice to see telling it UK English in one place automatically changes other language and location settings. Apart from that I think it was a computer name, user name, and what type of enviroment my PC is located in. It happily sat there installing away with me paying no attention to it, rarely being annoyed by it to enter information. Painless.
• Once booted up, after a few moments it let me know there was a problem with my sound drivers. By the time I had clicked on this bubble and read that going to Windows Update would fix it as there was a later driver known to fix this…. It had already done it for me. I can see this being a little concerninig for people, I’m impressed for now. We’ll see though.
• There were drivers installed for all devices upon first boot (ok except the dodgy sound one). Even XP doesn’t do this and I have great fun with the USB stick getting the network drivers across!
• Resource Monitor - Wowa. Cool. The other things I have mentioned have either been lazy things or good for your typical home user. Resource monitor is for the techies amoung us though. Detailed information on what processes are doing with memory, hard disk drive, and network.
• Suttle little nice things. Like lots more power saving options - my faviourite being adaptive display. If you keep having to bring your monitor out of standby, after it goes to sleep for being idle for x mins, by moving the mouse/tapping the keyboard (ie, something huge installing and you keep checking on it), it will realise and leave the monitor on longer!

Office 2007

• Oh. My. God. What a mess.
• Outlook 2007 - Yes, nice. I like it. Cleaned up where it needs to be - for example the accounts setup area makes a lot more sense for users I think. The to-do bar on the left is nice and useful I find too.
• Everything else - Word/Excel for example. What the hell have they done with the layout and menus? It’s giving me a head ache, let alone a normal user. I think yes it would be easier for a complete new user to Office - most people are not though and it is just plain confusing!

Others

I’ve not had too much of a chance to play with much else now. Visio looks much the same (but I haven’t too much experience with it yet anyway). I’ve mentioned it has some new features to people to be told they were in 2003, turns out they were a bit hidden though! Expression looks interesting - it’s a web page maker thingy - but they’ve lost the Front Page feel and gained more of a Visual Studio feel, and generally has more professional features. It won’t be for me at the end of day though, as I’m hardcore notepad user There all sorts of other things on this 2nd disc too that I shall get round to playing with I hope.
Don’t worry… I’m still a Linux lover. I have just changed my mind on how I did think Microsoft messed up with Vista.

Blame work. Windows based systems all over the shop. I was going to say all but we’ve had the odd Linux system starting to pop up since I’ve joined
Nearly bought a Mac Mini the other day. I am still going to but not until we’ve moved as I need money for that instead. A rare sensible comment from Karl that was! Blame work for that too. Well.. I’ve wanted a Mac for a while, but trying to support one with out no visual guidence, lack of experience, and just my memory at work pushed me over the edge the other day.