Life With Windows Vista: Issue 3

Posted by in March 2nd, 2007

Windows Vista. Hesitant to make the switch? So are we, so we’ve sent a troop into the thicket of Vista to scout it out. Join Jason Krueger as he takes us along on his journey through the ups and downs of “Life With Windows Vista”.

It's about knowing where to start
I have a quick update on the current status of NVIDIA graphics drivers
and that is not much has changed. 8800 users are the only ones able to
use SLI in Vista still and the drivers for Vista still need work for
features like overclocking and video out. Games are quite playable,
don’t get me wrong, but there are a lot of specific instances of
in-game issues that need be fixed in various games. No date yet for
WHQL certified drivers, but be sure that we will keep you posted about
them when they are ready.

Update:
As this was going to be published I received an email from NVIDIA
stating that within days their WHQL Vista drivers should be ready for
users to download and that it should fix many, but probably not all of
the current issues out there with their cards and Vista.

And now on to some Vista related goodness!

The ever-so-familiar start menu has been with us since Windows 95. It
has since become a staple of our Windows experience and has been
something we have either grown to love or hate, sometimes both. It has
been pretty much unchanged for a good 12 years now, through various
versions of Windows. While the start menu was previously labeled as
such, it’s now replaced by the Vista "globe" logo. Windows Vista puts a
new twist on how the start menu functions and adds some new features at
the same time, most noticeably the built-in search option.

One of my favorite features of Windows Vista is the new search option
on the new start menu. A simple press of the Windows key on your
keyboard and you can begin typing in your search query. You don't even
have to select the search field with your mouse, thus allowing one
button searching (plus whatever you type in for text) of your entire
computer.

For example, take a look at my search for Half Life on my computer. As
I have indexed specific folders on my computer I can get the results I
want when I search. As we can see in this example, not only do my
programs “Half-Life 2” and “Half-Life 2 Episode One” show up at the top
but so do files containing those words. We see some Excel work books
that contain those words from benchmarking for GotFrag Hardware and
some emails at the bottom from Gamespy that also contain those words.
And this isn’t a Windows XP “click on search, search locations, type,
wait, wait, wait, wait, here’s some results, not what I want, wait,
wait, there it is” style of searching - it is incredibly fast. It is
more like, “Hit your Windows key, start typing, there’s results, but
wait I am not even done typing yet”. I can open almost any application
in about a second and half because as soon as the results come up if
you hit enter it will auto-open the first search result (or you can
scroll your results without ever taking your hands off your keyboard
with the arrow keys). I still find myself browsing the menu out of
habit, but I am trying to force myself use the search more often, as it
is much faster than browsing sub folders.

In the next picture I have detailed how to access the Indexing Options
so you can configure what exactly you want Vista to search. Simply hit
your Windows key and type indexing and hit enter and it will bring you
to the Indexing Options in which you can select the folders and
applications that should be indexed - extremely easy and very handy.

The other main overhaul of the start menu is that the folders within
All Programs act more like the Windows Explorer sidebar and stay within
the main start window pane instead of the branching out, expanding
columns like in old versions of Windows. See my images below and you
can get an idea of how it works.

The next feature is still taking me some time to get used to. The
Windows Explorer in Vista has been tweaked with a "favorite
folders/searches/locations" section in the upper-left corner and the
new bread crumb navigation bar. It’s hard to explain without using it
and seeing it, but check out the pictures below.

Out of habit I always used to navigate from the left side pane, opening
and closing folders in the folder tree. However, the bread crumb bar is
far more intuitive and faster. As you hover over your current folder
you see all the sub folders so you can access them right from there
without clicking in the main window. Or, you can move further back on
the bread crumb bar and access any folder further up in Explorer. It’s
fast and efficient, but it may take some getting used to for many
people used to the old Windows ways.

The "favorite links" menu allows you save any search results, drag any
folder in this pane to make a quick shortcut, or view recently changed
items.

Thanks for stopping by and joining me for another article with Windows
Vista. Stay tuned for my next issue with some gaming benchmarks of my
rig on Vista against XP SP2 to see how the new OS stacks up to the old
standard in gaming performance.

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