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January 05, 2007

Vista-licious

The power outage a few weeks ago zapped my desktop machine at work...the registry or something was flaky. So I formatted the drive and installed Vista (which I should have done anyway).

So far it does look very nice, although I'm not sure if it is actually more usable or just looks nicer (for example the setup program was visually appealing, but I also thought it had a confusing assortment of controls, where sometimes you clicked "Next", and sometimes you clicked on a message, and sometimes you selected a radio button, and sometimes there was a dropdown, etc). Although looking nicer will help convince people that it is more usable, even if it isn't (just like something happening faster will make people think it is simpler, even if it isn't).

One funny thing happened today. Outlook hung and Windows popped up with a message, which it does when an app's main window's thread doesn't pull messages off the queue for some period of time (5 seconds, I think). In the XP days it would say something tech-sounding like "This application has stopped responding". But the Vista message just says "Outlook has stopped working". I know what they mean, but when I saw it I was reminded of this New Yorker cartoon:

As in "Outlook used to help you be productive...but now it's stopped and decided to actively interfere with your productivity! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

OK maybe it's just me.

Posted by AdamBa at January 5, 2007 09:39 PM

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