I just read an interview with Microsoft’s Jim Allchin. A few ‘must have’ features that will sell Windows Vista (at least to someone like me):
1. Start menu filtering. Can’t find where that program lives in the start menu? Just start typing the name in the new filter box and it’ll show up.
2. Virtual folders. A folder shortcut that shows you all files edited in the last week, or that contain a keyword.
3. Standard user mode. Default user is no longer Administrator! All I can say is, why did it take you 13 years and 9 versions to finally get that feature in Microsoft?!
4. Jim Allchin, “…we are going to encourage people to conceptually leave their machines on more.” How? Much less rebooting is required, power usage will be lower, protections against OS hangs, etc. I’ll wait and see how well this works in the final product, but again I say, it’s about time! He talks about the concept of On and Off for the user in Vista. Most users ignore the standby/hibernate features in Windows today. Vista will automatically take care of things in the background, and when a user clicks Off, it may just hibernate. Vista will intelligently figure out if it should do a full shutdown or not, based on timing, the amount of crap in RAM, etc. I just hope there’s a way to allow us power users to manually tell it what we want to do. I hate it when software makes things too easy at the expense of control.
There are a lot of yawners, like the improved searching, the avalon interface stuff, etc.
It does look to me like you are going to need a pretty mean machine to run this. And yet at the same time they are trying to improve Window’s power usage? How does that work? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
