Robert Hampton

I think I’m more or less up and running now. One of the first things that popped up when I switched on was a warning that a driver (i.e. one which was preinstalled on the machine) had been disabled because it was not compatible with Vista. Great. 😐 It doesn’t seem to be affecting anything, though.

I gave up on Easy Transfer after it repeatedly failed mid-copy with a network error. I copied everything across manually, which wasn’t too much trouble, just a question of finding where various programs keep their settings (why does DigiGuide save its settings in C:\Program Files? I’m sure it’s not supposed to do that).

And what about Windows Aero, aka “Windows Title-bars-contain-blurred-views-of-the-window-beneath”? Well, it looks OK, but doesn’t really add much to the user experience. It’s cool to press Win+Tab and see all the windows flip around in 3D, but again it’s not exactly a killer feature.

Microsoft Word 2007 has a new interface, which is quite a departure from what I’m used to (we use Word 2003 at work). I’m sure Microsoft engineered it with the assistance of 32 different focus groups and with words like “ergonomic” in the design brief, but it’s going to take some time to get up to speed. Where’s the dancing paperclip when you need him?

Internet Explorer 7 is as it was when I tried it a few months back. On Vista, it has something called Protected Mode, which I didn’t investigate further as the only thing I’ve used IE for was to download Firefox. Attempting to install Adobe Flash popped up a message from the OS saying “this application may not have installed correctly”, but the Strong Bad E-mail loaded without a hitch.

I think Vista and I will get along just fine. I’m not exactly blown away by it, despite the hype.

I’ve just noticed that the new computer doesn’t have a parallel port, which raises the slight problem of how I’m going to connect my printer. Damn you, USB! Your serial bus isn’t universal in my house!