Vista`s Six Month Check-Up - Functionality and Usability
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This could be the most important aspect of this review. It doesn't matter how secure your computer is if it is unusable. I wouldn't describe the changes to Vista as a great leap forward or anything near a drastic change. They're closer to just a nice visual overhaul and the addition of a few programs. I was really surprised at the excellent functionality of the sidebar. The standard sidebar items didn't do much for me, but the ones you can download added a new element to the OS. You could download a sidebar for XP via a third party, but this was built into Vista.
The whole glass theme is nice looking, but it's not more than looks. Overall I enjoyed the glass effects and new window transitions. It took me back to the days when I used a Mac as far as the feel goes. I have a Pentium Mobile 2.0 GHz and 1.5 GB RAM and it definitely took a hit on my memory and CPU running Glass. Early into Vista's life, there were some programs that didn't play well with Glass, and ended up having the program disable it. Now most programs have been ironed out and I haven't run into a problem with this in a while.
I am totally in love with the new layout of the start menu. Instead of having an All Programs pop out menu, Vista condenses into a scrolling menu that pops up in the left column of the start menu. This is the major change in Vista. It lets you find things a lot more quickly than the old pop up menus that can take up over half the screen.
I didn't get much use out of the new search functionality. I used it mainly for finding programs which I knew the commands for running, such as 'cmd' or 'calc.' The taskbar got an addition too. You can now scroll over the opened area of a program and a preview window opens up and shows you what the program is doing or what it has opened. I thought this was a great idea, but I never really used it all that much. I knew what was on each screen. When you have Word open, you can see the title of the document in the task bar and the preview is too small to read what is in the document. It is a great idea, but doesn't really serve a point in my opinion.
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