ITauthor

I'm not particularly impressed by Vista, but on the other hand I've never been that bothered by it either. The way some people talk about it you'd think it was almost unusable. Of course it's not. The problem for Vista, I think, is that Microsoft made people wait and wait and wait for it and then when it finally came out it's (on the surface at least) not a whole lot different to Windows XP.

Windows 7 is getting some rave reviews after the recent PDC. Personally I'd just like Microsoft to fix Windows Explorer.

For me, the best thing in Vista is finding things from the Start menu. That's the way I start most applications now: Windows key, type the first few letters of the application you want, press Enter. The worst thing about Vista is that there are real problems with Windows Explorer. If you're on a network it can work like a dog. After pressing Windows key + E it can take over a minute before you can do anything in the Windows Explorer window. But I've discovered one way of speeding up Windows Explorer a little: remove your network drives.

Right-click on Network and choose Disconnect Network Drive and remove any drives that show up. This brought my start up time for Windows Explorer down to 18 seconds. Still an annoying delay, but just about bearable.

I should add that I suspect the problem I'm having has something to do with the fact that my work network runs on Windows NT, which is not supported for use with Vista. Because of this, my laptop is not part of the domain. If, like me, you update Windows as one of the first things you do with your new laptop, and you put SP1 on it, you won't be able to join an NT domain. If you're in this situation you should make sure you add your laptop to the domain before you add SP1.