Topic: Vista

[scottws]

Jennie's mom was forced to upgrade her tablet PC to Vista and Office 2007.  She said it had something to do with the latest and greatest in front of all the customers she visits.

Well, the four of us (inlcuding Jennie's son) all went to visit some of Jennie's family in Arizona this past week.  We spent much of the time at their house and I got a chance to check out Vista and Office 2007 a bit.

I was really impressed by Vista.  The look of it was very clean and the animation of all the windows was smooth.  I'm not sure if I think it's a little over-the-top or a nice touch, so I guess that means it is at least passable.  The improvements to the Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) utility were impressive and welcomed.  I didn't get to look at everything, but for the most part the interface seems intuitive enough.  I didn't have a major problem finding anything.

All the built-in games were overhauled and there are a few new ones like Mahjong and some kids game.  An example of the overhaul is solitaire.  Now when the cards are dealt, there is the sound of cards shuffling.  And when you win the cards still fall out of the four slots but instead of bouncing they shatter into colored clubs, spaces, hearts, and diamonds.

My experience with the Vista OS completely turned around my reservations I initially held.  I plan on getting it as soon as possible either through Jennie's mom (legal full retail license) or through school (legal OEM license or maybe volume license if I can get my hands on one of the ISOs in the labs).

Office 2007's interface ribbon was a nice, intuitive change.  It makes sense, but it is just too freaking big.  It takes up a ton of space.  Other than that it's pretty much the same Office.  Also, Office 2007 introduces yet another revision in DOC file formatting (not sure about XLS or PPT).  Jennie had homework to do and her online class told her that they couldn't open the DOC she posted in the newsgroup.  Way to go MS.  I guess you have to manually save as Office 2003 or Office 2000/XP/2002 if you want the files to be as compatible as possible.

[Pugnate]

Wow... well I really respect your opinion especially regarding something like this. Good to hear, because as much as I want to hate Vista, PC gaming really needs a boost with all the console fanfare.

[scottws]

I know.  I really want to hate Vista too, but it's nice.

I have to take back what I said about getting it right away though.  I need a new computer first!

[Pugnate]

Well if you need any advise, I'd be happy to give my opinion. I researched long and hard before going for Intel. Well it was a no brainer to be honest.

I'd like to go for Vista at some point as well, but I am wondering if there any bugs with dual booting. Also nVidia as of yet has no driver for Vista. I guess they are waiting for a retail release, meanwhile ATi has one but apparently it has issues.

[Xessive]

The ATi driver is still technically a beta. Hopefully the good drivers from both nVidia and ATi will come in soon.

I'm very curious to see how Vista actually is. After Scott's reaction, now I'm just anxious!

So far my system seems ready to handle Vista, but I'm not too certain about my CPU.

[iPPi]

Vista is supposed to be amazing.  I know several people who use it and they really like it.

Office 2007 is really good as well.

[Jedi]

Office 2007's interface ribbon was a nice, intuitive change.  It makes sense, but it is just too freaking big.  It takes up a ton of space.  Other than that it's pretty much the same Office.  Also, Office 2007 introduces yet another revision in DOC file formatting (not sure about XLS or PPT).  Jennie had homework to do and her online class told her that they couldn't open the DOC she posted in the newsgroup.  Way to go MS.  I guess you have to manually save as Office 2003 or Office 2000/XP/2002 if you want the files to be as compatible as possible.

Most of the office apps have new file extensions, ie .DOCX .PPTX and .XLSX or something like that. But if you take the file and rename it so that it has a .ZIP extension you can open the file in winzip to reveal a few files inside. They've broken the fiel information down into groups like, text, format and style info' etc. I know the betas for Office 2007 still had the normal .DOC inside, don't know why, but I don't think that'll be the case for the finished product.
And yes you have to go Save As and change it from the Office 2007 format to Office 2000 format (.DOC) but I think their releasing a patch so that older office versions will be able to open the new extensions - I think that's a lesson they learned way back when Office 2000 came out.