[Douglas]

So, I am taking some classes at a local College that require access to a computer with Vista and Office 2007 and rather than waste my time at the computer lab I bought Office 2007 and Vista Home Premium and installed them both on a newly installed Hard drive in my Mac pro under BootCamp.

Wow, I am really surprised at how much I enjoy using both Vista and Office 2007. I don't plan on leaving the Mac Platform behind anytime soon, but I am really really surprised at how much better an experience using Vista is than XP (which I still have on another hard drive on my Mac). Vista seems to be very "Mac Like" in its operation and honestly I can't believe how nice Office 2007 is. I recently installed Office 2008 on the Mac and all I can say is that 2007 under windows is WAY nicer, in my opinion.

I haven't had a chance to try any Direct X 10 games yet, being WAY too busy with classes now, but I am really looking forward to seeing what it's like.

I guess the whole point of this is I really love the fact that I can do so much with my Mac, even try the "other guys" operating system.

Anyone else tried Vista yet? What do you think?

Have a great weekend everyone!!

Douglas

[J'nathus]

I had Tiger when Vista came out. I ran the Beta 2 and RC1. Beta 2 was so laughably horribly resource hungry I kept wondering what kind of machine Microsoft thought people would be running when Vista released.

As an example, the CPU idled at 20%.. meaning NOTHING is going on and it's running at 20%. Memory was consuming a good 1.5GB. Both of these while doing nothing but looking at the desktop.

My last MacBook Pro was my first Mac ever, and my current one is my second. For notebooks I'll never have anything other than Mac, but for my desktop, I need a PC to accommodate all the games that I have bought for PC over the years and going forward compatibility with newer titles. I dual-boot XP and Vista on my desktop for compatibility for apps and games. I figure I'll eventually be able to use Vista full-time for that desktop. It's reasonably enjoyable, but I get much farther much faster in Leopard than I do in Vista, and that's after more than 10 years of Windows-only computing.

I agree with your assertion that Vista has some deliberate Mac-like setup features... Including the use of a rendered desktop environment, transparencies, the navigation bar on the left hand side of explorer windows (not unlike the one found in the Finder). In Vista I turn that off, as I get around faster with the interactive address bar found at the top of the windows. I wish Vista's search would index more efficiently and index the whole drive. In Leopard I can find any file I want in seconds. In Vista, if I'm not searching in an indexed area, I have to specifically tell it to search in the non-indexed area.

MANY Windows users are very put off by the new interface in Office 2007. I like the new one, and I've heard why they changed it so drastically. They said that the top 10 feature requests for office every year are features that are presently possible in Office, so they decided a new interface was needed to hopefully reveal the functionality better to users. Although I like it, many users I've come into contact with do not.

So, to answer your question, yes I've used Vista, and I do like it . . . but for my very specific needs and tolerances, it's not the single answer to my computing needs equation. It does answer my gaming needs almost completely. Whatever it doesn't cover is covered by my MBP, my XP partition or my X-Box 360.

[Dark_Archon]

Are we using the same Vista? The user interface acts almost exactly like the XP one, the only difference is it doesn't look like plastic. It is entirely un-maclike and nonsensical.

Microsoft at least implemented a consistent UI for Office 2007, but you need to dig around to find anything.

[QuantaCat]

My condolences, Douglas.

[The Liberator]

Ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust,
XP to Vista.

Liberator.

[Quicksilver]

Once you turn off all of the security crap (I'm mostly pointing the finger at UAC here), Vista is a step up from XP, unless you're a Mac gamer running anything less than a Mac Pro/8800 GT (last time I checked, there was still a minor performance penalty in Vista, although I'll test that again shortly). The installation process is smoother, the UI is far less ugly, and you can actually search for applications in much the same way that you do with Spotlight.

On the other hand, the defragmentation tool shows absolutely no information about its progress, disk transfer speeds are abysmal, and they're still using the same old Start Menu interface that wasn't a good move in Windows 95 and is less of one today. Run more than an app or two, and Windows still becomes unwieldy.

Oh, and I agree: Office 2008 for the Mac is horrible. While I'm sort of being pretentious here and assuming that I know what everyone in the Apple camp wanted, I still say that Mac users wanted a lightning-fast Office 2004, and instead, we got the even slower, Intel-native (!!!) Office 2008. Hence, a lot of us have switched to iWork for most projects, keeping Office around only for projects where perfect compatibility is essential.

[Cobra]

While it obviously has a lot more in common with XP than OS X, there are a few things you can't look past.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QT6YO30GhmQ

[Quicksilver]

(The video he linked to was the one where David Pogue notes the similarities between Vista and OS X)

You know what? If Microsoft wants to make a exact copy of OS X, let 'em try. I'm not convinced that they can. If they manage to do a convincing job, it'll make my life a whole lot easier.

[teflon]

Quicksilver, on July 21st 2008, 09:34 AM, said:

disk transfer speeds are abysmal,

actually theyre about as fast. Its just that Vista reports them more accurately. I cant think of the exact terminology or process, but XP reports the transfer finished a bit before it actually is, which makes it seem faster.

[J'nathus]

teflon, on July 21st 2008, 11:40 AM, said:

actually theyre about as fast. Its just that Vista reports them more accurately. I can't think of the exact terminology or process, but XP reports the transfer finished a bit before it actually is, which makes it seem faster.

Actually there was a very pronounced problem with disk transfer. You could move a 100 MB file (game demo, or what have you) from your desktop to another partition or drive and Vista would report that it'll take 32 minutes or something crazy. One of the patches (contained in SP1) fixed that quirk for the most part. Now my disk transfers are actually faster than in XP.

I don't maintain that Leopard is perfect. I couldn't use Leopard on my Windows network with cross platform shares until they released a patch that fixed whatever that problem is. I still can't use Front Row for very long as the animation of music with album art seems to have a problem that causes lockups / display issues. But, then again, the media center on Vista crashes so frequently, it's hardly ever worth starting.

Personally, I'm not in love with any manufacturer over another . . . or any software company over another. I go to who has what I want, when I want it. So, for me, right now . . . I need a Windows box and an OS X box. If I weren't such a gamer, I could TOTALLY live with OS X full-time. Since that's not likely to change (and I have no patience for the delay of Mac ports), I'll probably continue to run both for some time.

[Dark_Archon]

Quicksilver, on July 21st 2008, 04:34 AM, said:

Oh, and I agree: Office 2008 for the Mac is horrible. While I'm sort of being pretentious here and assuming that I know what everyone in the Apple camp wanted, I still say that Mac users wanted a lightning-fast Office 2004, and instead, we got the even slower, Intel-native (!!!) Office 2008. Hence, a lot of us have switched to iWork for most projects, keeping Office around only for projects where perfect compatibility is essential.

I'm very impressed with what Apple turned Pages into. Office has always driven me nuts because it does too much and it does it too poorly. Pages is clean and simple and does what I want. The problem with the compatibility issue is documents from Office Mac 2004 look different in Office 2003. Heck... documents I make on one lab computer in Office 2003 look different on another computer in a different lab in Office 2003. I gave up on Office 2007 when I discovered that feature where it did "on-the-fly" file corruption of the file you are working on. Of course I didn't notice the document was screwed up until after I saved it then tried to scroll to the top of the document. This was after suffering through using it for a while, so while annoyed that my work was gone, I wasn't to depressed about having a concrete reason to not use it again for a long time.

[Cobra]

I'm am also much happier with iWork over Office. Considering the price difference between the two suites I really didn't have to put any thought into my choice.

The only thing that seems to really suffer bringing a Doc over into pages seems to be tables and the likes.


Plus with Pages you can create a document that truly will looks the way you wanted it to, as you can export it to a PDF

[Mr. Selvetarm]

I just used Pages to make my avatar and to tell the truth I didn't like it as much as Word '08. Pages didn't like it when I tried to over lap textboxes and stuff and it made me feel too protected, like I was a 2nd grader in a school computer lab.

[Quicksilver]

One thing that Apple needs to work on in iWork are their damn toolboxes. They're incredibly unintuitive--and this is from someone that got the "special" Apple training when I worked at the Apple Store Woodfield.

[Douglas]

Quicksilver, on July 25th 2008, 04:24 PM, said:

One thing that Apple needs to work on in iWork are their damn toolboxes. They're incredibly unintuitive--and this is from someone that got the "special" Apple training when I worked at the Apple Store Woodfield.

Yeah, everyone (including me) has bitched about Microsoft and their products in the past, but where is Apples version of this for THEIR products...

http://office.micros...0565001033.aspx

You have to admit about Microsoft, at least they "have your back" when it comes to free training resources...

Douglas