Whalespeak

It feels good to bash Vista. I find myself screaming at it on a near daily basis. But when I use another OS, I find that there are some small things that I miss. I thought it would be interesting to think of as many good things about it as I could. So far I’ve got:

1. toolbar previews on hover

I don’t know if this has a name, but if you have multiple windows open and you hover the mouse over the toolbar, you get a little pop-up preview of that app or web page. At first I thought this was feature bloat but I’ve come to find it useful for checking how something is running while I’m, for example, watching a video.

2. alt tab to desktop

In addition to cycling through windows, you can get to the desktop, minimising all windows. This seems intuitively right, but it’s really a completely different function when you consider it.

3. massive icons

You can get some really big icons in your folders. Good for picture and video previews. I might be alone on this or just getting old, but I love giant icons.

4. partitioning took about 20 seconds

There are a lot of things that require fewer screens, fewer choices and less technical know-how. For example I recently had to partition my hard drive and I settled down for what I imagined would be a fairly long headache. About half a minute and I was done. What? This is a Microsoft product right?

5. er…

Ok I’m done. Anyone else?