When I started my new gig on the 15th of this month, I was handed a new laptop to do all my work on. It’s a nifty little gadget with 3GB RAM! Very schmick. There was one catch..

… see, the company is migrating to Vista, which means I have to use it too. A while ago I posted my thoughts with regards to installing Vista, so as you can imagine it’s a little bit strange having to use it.

So after two weeks of using it, how have I found it? Well, for a beefy machine with this much RAM, I’d expect more. It doesn’t feel any faster than my desktop, which is nearly 4 years old and runs Windows XP Pro x64. It’s a little disappointing in that regard. Rather than speak about things in general, here are the list of things that I do like about it…

Windows explorer breadcrumbs. This feature is one that is sorely missed in Windows XP. Having the ability to leap to anywhere in the folder hierarchy at the click of a button is a real winner. I know you have similar functionality in XP, but you have to repeatedly click the “up folder” button, which is just crap. It might be not be something that I’ll use a lot, but it’s nice to have.

The look of Aero. The new coat of paint is nice and is a bit of a breath of fresh air. That’s about all I have to say.

The application search feature in the Start menu. This is something I use all the time. Shortcuts take to look to find with the mouse, and typing is SOOO much faster. Excellent feature. Shame it took so long to appear!

Built-in “open command window here” function. To get this feature in Windows XP, you needed to install a power toy. Thankfully, to do this in Vista, all you need to do is hold down the SHIFT key when you right-click the mouse in Windows explorer. Easy peasy.

With the good things out of the way, here are the things that I find pretty darned awful…

The performance of Aero. It’s woeful. A machine with this amount of grunt shouldn’t struggle to render the UI. The fact that it does makes me feel that there’s way too much going on behind the scenes. I’d be willing to go back to XP so I can have a UI that’s responsive.

The new Aero window switcher (accessible via Windows Key + TAB). Who uses it? ALT + TAB does the job, why bother with an overly resource-intensive, animated version that does the same thing but slower?

Window previews of everything (sorry, no screenshot, because I turned it off). Every time you move the mouse you seem to get a window popping up with a mini-preview in it. It drove me nuts, so I had to kill it.

Windows explorer performance. Is it just me, or does it take an ice-age for the file explorer to become responsive after you open it (that is, more than three seconds)? Displaying a list of files and whatnot on your machine should be lightening fast. It isn’t on this machine.

Network browsing performance. It sucks. Both at work and at home the speed of network browsing is just woeful. I know for sure that it’s Vista playing silly-buggers, because on both of those networks the XP machines are lightening fast.

UAC. I don’t need to say any more about this, because it’s been said a million times before by many other people.

There are other things that I do and don’t like, but I don’t consider them to be worth noting because they’re the kind of things that you find in most operating systems :)

So have any of you been using Vista (either by choice or by force)? If so, how are you feeling about it?