Vista: Six Months On...

I've been living and working with Windows Vista for about six months now, through both good times and bad, and on a variety of different machines: my desktop, a couple of notebooks, a few Virtual PCs, and so on.  I've come to like it even when at first I thought some things were very strange, but that doesn't mean there's room for improvement.  Here's a grab bag of things that stand out.

• Reliability and Performance Monitor.  Once you start using this tool, you get hooked on it.  As I mentioned before, it's a great way to find out what might be thrashing your hard disk or hogging your CPU.  Use it in good health and bad.
• UAC.  We hate it, but it's probably here to stay, like Product Activation (yecch and double yecch).  Most of the people who actually like UAC, I've found, are the people who have seen it do what it was intended to do: alert the user to an unauthorized escalation of privileges.  After it trapped one program trying to do just that, I decided UAC was more than worth having handy.  I am reminded of the time I ended up owning a dog, and was rather dubious about keeping him -- until the night he frightened off someone trying to sneak into my backyard.
• Indexed Search.  Entirely too useful, especially with Outlook, although I wish other programs could make more aggressive use of it.  I suspect in time they will.  One problem I did have with Outlook 2007 initially involved it getting stuck and not indexing everything, but after I deleted and recreated the index the problem went away.  Another thing you need to be careful of is to only set up the directories that you need indexed.  Indexing a whole drive, apps and all, is a waste of time and performance unless you have a very specific reason for it.
• Boot management.  It sucks, but you can work around that.  For the few machines where I needed to do multiboot with Vista, I set up Boot-It Next Generation and used that to manage everything.  Trying to work with Vista's boot manager to do anything other than create different boot scenarios for Vista itself (and even that's a pain) is, as someone else once said, like trying to build a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
• Windows Photo Gallery.  This wins the "Vista Tool I Never Thought I'd Use" Award.  Like a lot of other people I've got tons of digital photos, and after dumping them into WPG and messing with the program a bit I realized that I had pretty much the only tool I needed to make sense out of them all right there in front of me.  I still use IRFANVIEW for casual image viewing and editing, but for organization and tagging WPG is terrific.
• Speed.  On the same hardware, all other things being equal, Vista is at least as fast or faster than XP SP2.  It may not happen immediately, because Vista needs to learn a bit about your work habits first -- i.e., figure out what programs you're running and set up pre-caching appropriately.  (I know some people are reporting that Vista "churns constantly," and I think part of that is observer bias: they see the HD being active, when it's indexing or defragging, and they think that means the system is suddenly busy.  I've found that if you start doing something, the churn turns out to be entirely passive, because it's been pegged as a low-priority process.)  One thing I'm going to be curious about is testing a RTM build of Vista and the inevitable SP1 for speed on the same hardware, and see how they do.
• Defrag.  I got more mail about Vista's changed defrag app than I did just about anything else I wrote about in Vista (save possibly the backup tool -- see below).  For the most part, people hate it, although a) I like the fact that you don't need to run defrag manually anymore, and b) I'm still of the opinion that the graphical statistics that most defrag programs give you are not going to give you the whole picture -- and in fact may give you wholly misleading information that doesn't really tell you what needs to be defragged and why.  If you want a good third-party defrag program, though, I'll recommend JKDefrag, which has both command-line and graphical modes.  (One caveat: JKDefrag does not honor the prefetch directory's layout information, so after you run it any prefetch data created by Vista will have to be recreated from scratch.  I understand the author is aware of this and is working on a way to accomodate it in future releases as soon as he figures out how to do that.)
• ReadyBoost.  I still don't have a decent USB drive to test this out with yet, but I'm wildly curious especially given the crazy mix of programs I run all the time.  I plan on going shopping next month for one that is certified to work well with Vista.  I'm curious to see how it performs on 512MB, 1GB and 2GB systems.
• Backup/restore.  In a word: BLECH!  The backup application is definitely brain-dead -- but I've stuck with it despite myself and found a few interesting ways to conduct end-runs around its dumb design.  One which I plan to write about soon is how to exclude directories from a full-drive backup without moving them somewhere else (although this trick only works on the C: drive).  More on that later.  Also, the full-system backup only does complete images, as far as I can tell; it doesn't perform differential/incremental backups at all. which further limits its utility.  (Stop me if I'm wrong with this.)
• Hardware support.  64-bit support for legacy hardware is a no-go, so I wasn't able to use 64-bit Vista at all.  Then again, 64-bit Vista on the desktop isn't as critical as I thought it might be, if only because the benefits of 64-bit really don't come forward unless you're running with more 4GB of memory and using applications that demand that kind of load.  That probably explains MS's not phasing out 32-bit Windows on the desktop (rumors to the contrary): it's still quite useful.  I don't see me going to 64-bit anytime soon unless the need really emerges -- and unless a new scanner and printer become part of the picture, it ain't happening.
• Notebooks.  The better your individual notebook manufacturer has provided support for Vista, the better you'll be.  Support for notebook power management with only the default / stock drivers seems to be all over the map -- and as far as Aero goes, it isn't even supported on my notebook's chipset, so that's a moot point.  (Blame Intel.)

Am I happy with Vista?  I could be happier, but right now I'm happy enough that I use it as my default OS, and I suspect that's the most important thing.  Now let's see where they go from here.