Vista – it’s the little things that make it so nice.

I’ve been using Vista on my desktop since it was officially released at the consumer level.  I didn’t blog about it, but my upgrade on my desktop workstation did not go well.  Generally, unless you have a large IT department doing the work, my advice is get Vista with a new machine.

 

Yesterday I caved and purchased the new Apple aluminum keyboard and a Mighty Mouse.  These two things are pretty expensive considering that they are both wired, but I absolutely love the feel of the flat keyboard, and I thought I might as well make it a matching set.

 

The important part is that I wasn’t originally planning on using these devices on my Vista laptop.  Rather, I was going to use them on my Mac Mini which I keep around just to be cool like Steve Jobs .  However, at some point last night I decided to plug them into my laptop to see if they would work.  Well, Vista picked them up and they work quite nicely.  Without installing any software the keyboard is working, and the mouse and its weird buttons and scroll ball (on top) are working fine.  The special function keys (volume, etc) aren’t working yet, but I believe Apple has a driver out there somewhere.

 

After that went smoothly, I was playing around with Flip-3D in Vista and I noticed that when I did it, my MSN Live Messenger window automatically indicated that I was ‘busy’.  This isn’t a Vista feature, but it’s a nice bit of integration between Vista and Messenger.  There is a setting that you can turn off that prevents the ‘busy’ flag from being set whenever you are running a full screen app (which Flip-3D apparently counts as) or in presentation mode.

 

Finally, things like the breadcrumbs in Explorer, the search in the start menu (I haven’t organized the start menu ever – no need, just type a few letters), the previews in the task bar and the previews when using Alt-Tab just make Vista a nice place to spend time.

 

Maybe another day and I’ll post about the Vista annoyances… can you say UAC?  I knew you could!