Life’s good: living with Vista RC1 and Office 2007 every day

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 09 October 2006

Page 3 of 5 Hibernating, sleep and turning off all worked, but then they seemed to go funny, blue screening on occasion. Turns out a piece of ‘unknown’ hardware that I decided to install using XP drivers about a week ago was causing this problem, uninstalling it again restored the hibernation, sleep and turn off modes to normality. The User Account Control (or UAC) proved a bit annoying, so it was just turned off. While this isn’t Microsoft’s intention, unless it is made much less annoying, perhaps working with the ‘lock’ system that Mac OS X employs, I’ll be leaving it off, and you probably will too. The Sidebar has been played with, but mostly it’s been off. It is useful, and there’s be all many more interesting gadgets created once Vista has launched, but for now, it wasn’t a priority. Neither were games, which are important for some, but for now just using the operating system to do everyday work was the most important aspect. DVD playback almost works, but it’s stuttery, thus rendering it unwatchable. Luckily there’s a DVD player hooked up to my TV, so this hasn’t been a big issue. However DiVX, xVID, AVI and other video clips work perfectly well in Vista’s Windows Media Player, as long as the correct codecs are installed. Another problem revolves around Flip-3D. If too many windows are open, sometimes trying to demo Flip-3D causes the main screen to go dark, with the only way to see the screen being to plug it into an external monitor. If an external monitor is not at hand, all that can be done (that I know of) is to hold down the power button until the system turns off. But knowing this, I make sure most Windows are closed and any open documents saved and shut down before trying to demo this feature. Clearly this is something that will be fixed by the RTM, and is hopefully fixed in RC2. Programs such as WinRAR, iTunes, FileZilla (a free FTP client), Windows Live Writer, Skype, Audacity, VLC Player, the Popcorn email reader, Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 and more have all worked without hassles. Web 2.0 apps such as Gmail, ThinkFree Office, Youtube and many more have also worked perfectly in Internet Explorer 7. From time to time, IE7 will crash if too many windows are open, but when you click on ‘check for solution’, a message pops up saying that that this issue has been fixed in the final version of Vista. I’ll certainly be checking to see if this is the case in RC2 and will report on it soon. So, what about Office 2007? << First page <   1 2 3 4 5 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751