Over the weekend, I installed both Windows Vista, and Office 2007. I have two internal hard drives in my Magic Elf Box, so trying out new operating systems is pain- and risk-free…my original XP install is saved on the secondary hard drive as an image file, and restoring the Pea Sea to its original state takes all of thirty minutes.
The verdicts:
Vista is shiny, and has lots of neat little features. It's also pretty bloated (both the hard drive and memory footprint), and all the new glitz takes up a lot of screen real estate. I toyed with it for two days or so, and then went back to Windows XP. My main beef with Vista is the fact that they moved so much stuff around that it takes four times as long to perform a task, because you have to re-learn the operating system.
All in all, I don't have a major issue with it, and I suppose my next new build will have Vista loaded on it, but for now I'm quite content with XP.
Office 2007, on the other hand, is a winner. It, too, has been changed radically from its predecessors, but in a good way. Everything is easier to find, and the new interface features actually make work go faster. Word finally has a live word count! (That's terribly unimportant to Suzy Soccermom, but for those of us who practically live in Word, it's a long-desired feature that will save the writing folks many mouse clicks.) They've even thought to include integrated blog publishing capabilities, so you can type up your Blogger posts in Word and then upload them with a single click. (No more lost Blogger posts because their "auto-save" feature doesn't.) After a day of using Office 2007, the old version of Office feels primitive in comparison.
So, Vista is out, Office 2007 is in.
Now I have to go and install BottledMilk 1.0 on Munchkin 2.0. She keeps losing the install, and I have to reload it every few hours. That's a major bug, if you ask me. What were the developers thinking?
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