Announcing the Windows Experience Blog

You may have noticed a small change in the look of our blog today in the addition of "The Windows Experience" label to the header above the Windows Vista News section.  As you will surely surmise, today we're launching a new sister blog to compliment the Windows Vista Team blog; and, of course, this new blog will be called The Windows Experience.  The new blog will be managed by my colleague Brandon LeBlanc and will document his use of Windows Vista in various scenarios (think hi-def video, photography, virtualization, networking, etc), using video and photos to convey his experiences as much as possible.

 

The aim of the two blogs is to jointly illustrate the what, why and how of Windows Vista while continuing to generate conversations about the product and respond to the questions and concerns of you, the community.  So not to worry, the existing Team blog's reason for being and my role in it do change.

 

We're excited about this new development and hope you will be, too.  Your comments are always welcome, so feel free to let us know what you think as we move forward (once we've got some material on the new blog, that is).  In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Brandon and head over to the new Windows Experience blog to check out his initial post.


Comments

  1. Posted on: May 05, 2007 at 5:43PM  

    I would have to agree with Bruce. Vista has definitely not been a good experience. I often have problems with IE being unable to do a right mouse click on a link to open in new tab or window. I have been unable to use Visual Studio 2005 to create new databases in SQL Server 2005 Express. I have on several occasions had only Default Programs and Windows Update on Start Bar. I often click on stacked programs, and I am unable to select one of he windows for example IE 7. I am running Vista Business. It is a brand new Toshiba Tablet that came load from factory. I do not have Vista Disk as I would definitely like to reload Vista from scratch as I am not sure how well it got installed by Toshiba. I have been unale to find a place to download a trial so that I could use that to reinstall Vista. Everything is up to date with the exception of my Wireless Adapter. I also often get messages about Windows Search Protocal stopping. I would appreciate any direction and help. I have looked all over the place with no solution. I am beginning to regret giving in and getting Vista and thinking people may be right that this is the next Windows Me.

  2. Posted on: May 06, 2007 at 11:50AM  

    The great thing About bookmarking this blog is that it now has a cool little Windows Vista Icon on my IE6 favourites.  I rebookmarked this site to get the icon for this site too.

    Great Job, nice Icon.

  3. Posted on: May 07, 2007 at 9:13PM  

    So far I am using Vista Ultimate 64 bit on one of my 5 computers and it seems good. I will not upgrade all my computers, as 2 of them are too old. I have purchased the family discount and intend to have 3 running vista eventually, but my highest performing machine has windows vista ultimate 64 bit and has only given me hardware incompatibilty issues due to no driver support from hardware manufacturers (Creative Labs and Kensington). There was one problem I cannot explain. When using google earth with my mouse wheel, rolling up or down both zooms in. This is frustrating but does not make it unusable by any means. I wish there was a way that XP drivers could work on Vista so some of my "obsolete" hardware could be used. Also, finding the Mute for the microphone is incredibly difficult, but it does actually exist.

    As far as stability and speed, my machine runs very well with vista. No issues whatsoever, but I do make sure that I have all new drivers installed which I'm sure makes a HUGE difference.

  4. Posted on: May 12, 2007 at 10:08AM  

    Oh My God - Windows Vista is horrible!!  What do we know - Steve Jobs is not at the helm.  I just bought a Dell with the "upgrade" to Windows Vists instead of an Apple.  My thoughts - hey, Microsoft has made all of its upgrades seemlessly, so I will not have to spend the hours assoicated with learning a new software, as I would with an Apple.  What an idiot I was.  Windows Vists is so counter-intuitive to XP, that I had to call customer service to figure out how to turn my computer off.  EVER single thing I try to do with the software takes hours of time to sort out - horrible!!!!!!!!!

    I'm going out of my way to tell every person I encounter to not upgrade unless you have 100 hours of time to learn the system.  Then I talk to my Apple user friends who just laugh at me - "you should have bought an Apple - it's plug and play and easy to navigate".

  5. Posted on: May 18, 2007 at 10:07PM  

    Hi Nick, I am using Vista at home and enjoy it very much.  I installed a new hard drive and installed on it leaving my XP install and all data on the old drive.  

    I work for a company who contracts me out to a state agency.  I create images for new computers and ghost the images to new computers.  In the last year we have shipped over 1500 updated computers to sites and I am starting a new project that will deliver over 1600 to the sites.  I am very experienced with XP, I have now spent a great deal of time configuring Vista to be used by the agency.  Of course security is very important and I have only a few minor issues with Vista.  One major thing that I have noticed is that I cannot do a repair of a Vista install.  With XP we only needed to start on a bootable CD, bypass the first repair option and choose the second one.  This would put the users computer back in business quickly.  With Vista we do not have this option, the repair option just wants to install a previous backup.  None of our users have tape drives!  How many home users have a 10 GB tape drive?  I do but I am not the normal home user.  I suppose that it is the way the system was designed but it just seems to me that the developers paid way too much attention to those misguided people who envy MAC users, they created a good OS but left out the things that business users need badly.  I know of no other way to get this information back to MS.  I am convinced that the average business user does not want a MAC, if they did you would not have a job and neither would I.  I have worked with MAC's since 1990 and own a 17" iMAC so I am more than just a grouch.  I think that Microsoft needs to fire the MAC heads and get back to the business that has made you rich, the business users.  I am also one of those folks who still has a bootable 160K 5 1/4" floppy disk with DOS 1.1 on it and my copy of Lotus 123 ver 1.3 will still run on Vista if I choose to install a 5 1/4" drive, you can't do that on any MAC, let's keep it that way on PC's.  

  6. Posted on: May 21, 2007 at 1:46PM  

    Hi Nick, if they ever decide to come out with a "PRO" version of Vista (as in XP PRO) instead of this Vista ME version then business will be able to use Vista, until then it will just be fodder for the MAC lovers.  I use it at home with no problem but it is not fit for business use.

    Ted

  7. Posted on: May 21, 2007 at 6:30PM  

    HI everyone,, ive had windows vista premium for a little over a week and i absolutly hate it!!! it wont let me watch video clips on the net, it keeps shutting down insted of sleeping.. i cant find any help.. if anyone has the same problems and found any answeres PLEASE HELP ME>>

    Thanks Andrew

  8. Posted on: May 22, 2007 at 2:24AM  

    In ref to wilkesda11 usually any OEM (Toshiba) must offer the media (CDs or DVD) for a nominal charge (maybe 10 or 15 US dollars) of operating systems sold without said disks. I just bought a Dell refurb that came with Vista Home Premium and it came with the DVD but everytime I have purchased a PC that did not have media a single phone call got me the media sometimes at no charge.

  9. Posted on: May 22, 2007 at 2:35AM  

    Hey s10hotrod, I may be able to help with some of your issues. Please give some specifics. I know my way around Vista fairly well. The help files in Vista can work for you if you can ask the right questions.

    I have encountered certain major sites that use Flash video (Foxnews) in which IE7 and the latest Flash 9 and curent Java simply won't display the videos. The tests on the Adobe Flash links play fine and almost any other flash vid. I was able to "fix" this on several PCs by just installing Firefox. Oddly IE7 then began to display those foxnews vids! Something in the code on foxnews gets misinterupted by IE7. I have also fixed this by rolling back to IE6.

  10. Posted on: May 22, 2007 at 2:24PM  

    Does anyone have any info about the defrag utility.  I am getting an error about a missing path to dfrgui.exe when I try to defrag.  I cannot run it from a prompt nor when I right click to try to run it as administrator.  My user is the admin on my Home Premium version.  Any thoughts appreciated!!

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