Windows Vista

A couple of months ago I purchased a new Fujitsu Siemens laptop, and of course with it been 2007 it was Windows Vista.

Initially I thought this was great. From what I had heard about it it was good, the mac like window scrolling. Where all the windows that you are using appear on the screen and you can scroll through them and pick the one you want.

There are other great features like news feeds, weather reports etc. Which all appear down the right hand side of your desktop.

However on further inspection Vista is not as good as I first though. Granted I haven't researched the workings of Vista thoroughly. But I have started discovering little things that annoy me.

First off, the new version of Microsoft Word. It looks completely different to the traditional version which I have known since the age of about six. There is no "save as" option, which at first doesn't seem a big problem, until you realise that Vista world files are .docx, not the standard .doc files from all pre-Vista word programs. This means if you want to transfer a word file from a Vista computer to a pre-Vista computer, it comes up as an unkown file. Bugger. Thank god for file conversion web sites suzh as Zam Zar.

Also on Word, because it is a new layout I cannot seem to find how to change the page view, among other things. Perhaps if I had the patience to look for longer than 10 minutes I would have found it, but I am not blessed with much patience.

Secondly, downloading drivers for devices. On my old laptop (Windows XP), it was extremely simple for me to download drivers for the devices off of the internet. When I tried doing this on Vista it didn't work. After much googling I found a forum with a rather helpful member who had posted a step by step guide for downloading the driver.

It took about 5 minutes to get the driver downloaded and finally working, which to me is too long.

Overall Vista works fine, but it's just little niggles like what I have mentioned that spoil it for me. They have tried to make it too much like the Mac, and in the process spoiled it. Perhaps you people who know more about computers and the interactive world will point out things that I am wrong about, but to my limited knowledge Vista is a step in the wrong direction. In my eyes at least, the Mac is now superior. Just a shame the iBooks cost so much.