I went back to XP

Not on my own machine you'll be glad to know :) No, I was using a friends machine yesterday and it had XP on. It's amazing how quickly you get used to things in a new OS - and then take them for granted. A few years ago I remember going back to Windows 95 from XP and if felt alien, almost twee in some of it's workings. I can't imagine how it would feel to move back to Windows 3.11 and when I was using a Mac last week in the Apple store though I enjoyed it, I still felt I was being kept outside of the real workings of the OS somehow. Vista is a little more like that but not to the same extent.

Anyway, what did I miss most? Search.

Akrigg was right. Once you get used to using search to navigate your OS you can't live without it. It makes you lazy. Instead of clicking Start, Programs, Office, Word I now just click on the Windows Pearl, type Word and hit enter. Same for Media Player, Control Panel, Excel....everything. It's addictive and we have Google to thank in some ways. I use it everywhere now including integrated Wikipedia search in IE which I used to link to the word twee up above. I also have Amazon, The Guardian, my blog, and Technorati as integrated searches within IE. It's addictive and you can get them from the search providers page with one click.

I suppose the moral of the story is you don't really know how much better Vista is until you take a step back to XP or earlier. Sure there are some things in Vista that take some getting used to and I'm naturally biased, but towards the end of this month you should start seeing more machines in retail running Vista so if you can, give it a whirl. I think you'll like what you see.

 

Technorati tags: search, google, vista

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 06, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 06, 2007
  James, support for Windows 2000 ended mid-2005. It won't be a very wise recommendation.

• Anonymous
  January 06, 2007
  I completely agree! I was away from home on vacation for the holidays, and using my step-dad's Win2k machine.  Boy, the amount of times I ended up hitting some random keyboard accelerator, because I was always doing Windows Key + search, was very annoying!

• Anonymous
  January 06, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 07, 2007
  hi Eric thanks for your comments and interesting to hear your disappointment with Spotlight. At the moment, search works great on Vista for me for files but also for application launching etc. Time will tell if it slows down but having run the release code for a couple of months I'm pretty pleased. I used to use an add-on program on XP like some of those you mention, one of them (Lookout) was eventually bougth by Microsoft. I also used to use stuff like Konfabulator and a few others to give me Mac like experiences. Now our Intellipoint software has something in similar to Expose. I guess the hard part these days is finding true innovation. On the point about Google, I suppose what I'm alluding to is the fact that Google helped to make us all familiar with search as a method for finding, launching and filing information. No question there were people doing this way before. anyway, thanks for taking the time to comment. Seems my Mac readers are more talkative than any Windows folks ;)

• Anonymous
  January 07, 2007
  The comment has been removed