Vista usability improvements
February 6th, 2007
I installed vista the other day, and in my opinion it is very, very nice, it’s visually perfect, I love it. The side bar is a great addition, and again looks great. One of the nicest things apart from the nice 3d task switching, is the small previews of the window contents when you hover over applications on the the task bar.
I did however come across one usability enhancement that kind of kicked me in the balls. I had downloaded a nice side bar gadget that put a recycle bin in the side bar, and wanting a nice clean desktop decided to remove the trash can from the desktop.
So how to remove the recycle bin ? I went to control panel and searched through the appearance and customization settings, right clicked on the start bar and looked for advance options, all to no avail. Remembering in XP, there was an option in tweak UI to select the icons on the desktop, I then trawled the web search for a vista tweak UI, again to no avail.
Eventually, I resorted to web search and found an article on how to do it.
1) Select the recycle bin
2) Press delete.
Sometimes, the most obvious usability enhancements are just staring you in the face. I’m sure my 7 year old son, would have spotted that one. I guess you just get used to doing things the hard way sometimes.
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The comment “very very nice” and “visually perfect” !!!
That must have been made before you installed ubuntu and had beryl and full glx running.
I also have a soft spot for Macosx which is a far more intuitive os.
I think that aero just takes up an insane amount of ram for what it is. Its usabilty is very debatable. Its windows blinds with a bit of an upgraded alt-tab. the movie backgrounds are ok but suck the life out of system ram.
In comparison you can run beryl and have amazing effects using linux and hardly touch your system processes. I have windows xp pro, windows vista home premium and ubuntu fiesty 7.4 running in triple boot configutation on an athlon xp2600 shutlle with 1gb of ram and a AGP 7800 gs graphic card. Ubuntu is easily that fastest os and uses ram far more efficiently.
Vista is very annoying and is like slow motion in comparison. I alos note that in Vista Nvidia need to sort theor drivers out as my graphic card runs at full speed unless I use ntune to slow the fans down manually.