Polychromic
2005-07-29 17:35:12 UTC
Okay, I've had Vista installed now for a day and a half. It's not as
crashy as the last build I tried. That's the good news.
The bad news it is even more bloated and slow. Hopefully this will change
when they recompile the parts with all the optimizations on and the
debugging bits off. I first left it on all the default settings to try
and see what new stuff there was. Erm, there's not any. Things are
changed around, but nothing that I would call an improvement. Then I
started turning off the crap to see if I could get it back to a usable
form.
Can someone explain how making a window translucent helps you use it? I
just don't get that. It clutters the foreground window and the windows
behind it are really too blurry to read. You can't click on the hidden
windows or type into them. Is there some reason not to just use alt-tab
or the taskbar to manage your windows? I don't get it.
IE7's tabbed browsing is oddly configured. With Firefox you have tabs
immediately above the page (at least that's how I have it) but with IE7
the tabs are above the menu bar. There doesn't appear to be a way to put
the tabs below the menu bar so it kind of anti-ergonomic. Weird.
Every window has a bar with history back and forward buttons and an
address field. Apparently no way to disable that. I spent some time
fiddling through the registry to see what settings could be directly
adjusted but couldn't find that. Perhaps there is a way to forcibly
remove the IE parts and that "feature" along with it.
Speaking of removing components, there is no sysoc.inf file and no Windows
Component Wizard (sysocmgr.exe) so right now I don't know how to remove
the various hidden components. If you look in Help, there is a page on
add/remove but it just says something like "Put content here". Hopefully
there will be something to replace the missing sysocmgr.exe.
Ah, I misspoke earlier. There is one thing I noticed that is an
improvement - in the registry some of the new keys contain both a current
value and a default value which will help you set things back if you make
too many changes. Seems like there should be a wizard feature in regedit
to access these changes and revert them but I didn't see one however. But
you can do it manually with regedit.
There is some new boot manager (bootmgr) that can replace ntldr and
ntdetect.com. It still apparently uses boot.ini. This new boot manager
appears to be optional because there is a place to instruct Vista to use
the old version instead. If you use the new one you will see a strange
c:\boot folder which has the old boot manager files in it. I tried
deleting that folder and had no problems booting so maybe that's just the
backup location.
There are a LOT of new services running. Not super easy to find out
however because in Admin Tools there is no longer an icon to access the
Services. You can still get there through Computer>Manage however I
wanted just a shortcut for services.msc on my desktop so I made one. :)
I was able to figure out some of new services and disabled a lot of them
without any ill effects, except one called something like User Experience
Service. When I nuked that, Vista quit loading my settings so I had to
re-enable it.
Ah, speaking of users, each user profile is now stored in
C:\Users\<username> instead of in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>.
All of them except the All Users profile that is. Yep, now there is a
C:\Documents and Settings folder AND a C:\Users folder. I think this
might just be an oversight. I hope it is. I always hated that long
Documents and Settings folder name and would rather have a nice short
Users instead.
Even though the WinFS database filesystem will no longer be a part of
Vista, I found that there was a program running called the Windows Search
Engine. I disabled it in Services. Why must they assume all users are
idiots? How about start with a lean and mean default configuration and
then turn on the search engine after the 2nd or 3rd time the user click
Start>Search? Well, thank god that stickykeys still requires 5 presses of
the shift key before it is activated.
I noticed there is a huge c:\build folder. I do mean huge - Vista is
2.4GB on the DVD and this folder is about 3GB. I'm hoping this is a
temporary part of the beta because Vista seemed to be using the binaries
in this folder instead of the ones in C:\Windows\System32. I think I'll
delete it and see if Vista dies.
In Windows Explorer, there no longer appears to be a way to disable active
mouse tracking. Vista defaults to requiring dbl-clicks to launch
files,etc but now the focus follows the mouse everywhere and each file is
underlined as if it were a hyperlink. Annoying.
However, the most annoying and brain damaged thing, the single design
change that will utterly prevent me from every buying or recommending
Vista is the absence of the List view in Explorer. Sure they've dumped
some new filtering and preview features into Explorer. You can now have
it show itty bitty thumbnails for every file instead of just file type
icons. There is a preview pane you can use and shift from the bottom of
the Explorer pane to the middle - whichever you like. There are ways to
group and stack files. But there is no simple, usable List view
available. Jim Allchin needs to be kicked in the nads if that was his
idea.
Oh well, perhaps Beta 2 will be better.
crashy as the last build I tried. That's the good news.
The bad news it is even more bloated and slow. Hopefully this will change
when they recompile the parts with all the optimizations on and the
debugging bits off. I first left it on all the default settings to try
and see what new stuff there was. Erm, there's not any. Things are
changed around, but nothing that I would call an improvement. Then I
started turning off the crap to see if I could get it back to a usable
form.
Can someone explain how making a window translucent helps you use it? I
just don't get that. It clutters the foreground window and the windows
behind it are really too blurry to read. You can't click on the hidden
windows or type into them. Is there some reason not to just use alt-tab
or the taskbar to manage your windows? I don't get it.
IE7's tabbed browsing is oddly configured. With Firefox you have tabs
immediately above the page (at least that's how I have it) but with IE7
the tabs are above the menu bar. There doesn't appear to be a way to put
the tabs below the menu bar so it kind of anti-ergonomic. Weird.
Every window has a bar with history back and forward buttons and an
address field. Apparently no way to disable that. I spent some time
fiddling through the registry to see what settings could be directly
adjusted but couldn't find that. Perhaps there is a way to forcibly
remove the IE parts and that "feature" along with it.
Speaking of removing components, there is no sysoc.inf file and no Windows
Component Wizard (sysocmgr.exe) so right now I don't know how to remove
the various hidden components. If you look in Help, there is a page on
add/remove but it just says something like "Put content here". Hopefully
there will be something to replace the missing sysocmgr.exe.
Ah, I misspoke earlier. There is one thing I noticed that is an
improvement - in the registry some of the new keys contain both a current
value and a default value which will help you set things back if you make
too many changes. Seems like there should be a wizard feature in regedit
to access these changes and revert them but I didn't see one however. But
you can do it manually with regedit.
There is some new boot manager (bootmgr) that can replace ntldr and
ntdetect.com. It still apparently uses boot.ini. This new boot manager
appears to be optional because there is a place to instruct Vista to use
the old version instead. If you use the new one you will see a strange
c:\boot folder which has the old boot manager files in it. I tried
deleting that folder and had no problems booting so maybe that's just the
backup location.
There are a LOT of new services running. Not super easy to find out
however because in Admin Tools there is no longer an icon to access the
Services. You can still get there through Computer>Manage however I
wanted just a shortcut for services.msc on my desktop so I made one. :)
I was able to figure out some of new services and disabled a lot of them
without any ill effects, except one called something like User Experience
Service. When I nuked that, Vista quit loading my settings so I had to
re-enable it.
Ah, speaking of users, each user profile is now stored in
C:\Users\<username> instead of in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>.
All of them except the All Users profile that is. Yep, now there is a
C:\Documents and Settings folder AND a C:\Users folder. I think this
might just be an oversight. I hope it is. I always hated that long
Documents and Settings folder name and would rather have a nice short
Users instead.
Even though the WinFS database filesystem will no longer be a part of
Vista, I found that there was a program running called the Windows Search
Engine. I disabled it in Services. Why must they assume all users are
idiots? How about start with a lean and mean default configuration and
then turn on the search engine after the 2nd or 3rd time the user click
Start>Search? Well, thank god that stickykeys still requires 5 presses of
the shift key before it is activated.
I noticed there is a huge c:\build folder. I do mean huge - Vista is
2.4GB on the DVD and this folder is about 3GB. I'm hoping this is a
temporary part of the beta because Vista seemed to be using the binaries
in this folder instead of the ones in C:\Windows\System32. I think I'll
delete it and see if Vista dies.
In Windows Explorer, there no longer appears to be a way to disable active
mouse tracking. Vista defaults to requiring dbl-clicks to launch
files,etc but now the focus follows the mouse everywhere and each file is
underlined as if it were a hyperlink. Annoying.
However, the most annoying and brain damaged thing, the single design
change that will utterly prevent me from every buying or recommending
Vista is the absence of the List view in Explorer. Sure they've dumped
some new filtering and preview features into Explorer. You can now have
it show itty bitty thumbnails for every file instead of just file type
icons. There is a preview pane you can use and shift from the bottom of
the Explorer pane to the middle - whichever you like. There are ways to
group and stack files. But there is no simple, usable List view
available. Jim Allchin needs to be kicked in the nads if that was his
idea.
Oh well, perhaps Beta 2 will be better.
--
The Polychromic Dragon of the -=={UDIC}==-
http://home.comcast.net/~macecil/
http://home.comcast.net/~safehex/
RGCUD Photo Gallery: http://home.comcast.net/~rgcud/
The Polychromic Dragon of the -=={UDIC}==-
http://home.comcast.net/~macecil/
http://home.comcast.net/~safehex/
RGCUD Photo Gallery: http://home.comcast.net/~rgcud/