So Long, Farewell, It's Time to Go....

XP

For all the naysayers out there, and all the pundits, the end is in site for XP. I've been using Vista now for nearly a month. The other day I went through all my old applications for XP and junked most of them.

It's time to say goodbye. Vista is that good that it's going to change the landscape. Why? The productivity gains are simply to big to ignore. Even at this early stage everything works.

What's the must have feature - SEARCH... yes that's right. Good old search. Microsoft have this one dialed. If I want to find something all I do is hit the Start button (now called the Perl) type a few characters and a list appears. Usually what I want is at the top already highlighted. I simply hit enter and I'm running. No more mouse clicking.

This search is also tied into Office 2007. In Outlook all you have to do is type a few characters and it highlights all the instances in what seems like a nanosecond. If they tie this kind of search to Live I think you will see a fundamental shift in how people use search.

As for the rest, Vista is fast, it's fast, it's fast. Did I say it's fast. Now sure I have a year old Sony Vaio 3Ghz with 2GB of RAM (Vista gives it a rating of 3.4) - however it still cranks. The new machines coming out will start showing numbers above 5.0 and what you see and feel will be amazing.

Finally what about the User Interface. Well I love it. And I've had the opportunity to test drive it against Mac OS 10. Give me Vista anyday.

So as Maria Von Trappe would say, "So Long, Farewell, It's Time to Say Goodbye" to XP

Getting to know Vista

Since it's been snowing forever in Colorado I've been confined to the basement and have had the chance to install/re-install Vista "many" times. The reason I do this is to learn my way around.

Here's one reason Vista is going to be a smash hit...

Search.

If Microsoft figure out how to do Live Search as well as Vista search then Google watch out.

Search in Vista is simply killer. Here's what I do, hit the Start button (now called the Pearl) - start typing what you are looking for and just like magic it's in the display. It's incredibly fast. Real time.

Yesterday I needed Opera to test something. All I did was hit the Pearl, typed Opera and then without looking hit the Enter key. Next thing Opera is running.

Another feature about Vista - it's much faster than XP. Office 2007 loads VERY quickly. And again the Search feature is killer. Start typing and it finds every instance for you and highlights it.

Are these must have features. In my opinion - Yes. It's not worth me going back to XP. However that being said I'm also running VM Ware 6.0 and have an XP virtual machine. This totally rocks. VM Ware is still beta, and still has debug code turned on, however I've been doing all kinds of presentations and it works perfectly.

So I now have the best of both worlds... Vista and XP Virtual machine. All this is running on a Sony Vaio with 2GB of RAM and 210 GB hard drive. It's a dual core 3Ghz Pentium with 512k of RAM for the Virtual machine. Totally rocks.

Go out and get Vista - and if you need Xp compatibility get a copy of VM Ware's 6.0 Workstation. You won't be disappointed.