Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Windows Aero : Vista's Graphical User Interface

A lot has changed in Vista, most notably its graphical user interface (GUI) that we mortals use all the time. For Vista, its been named "Aero" which stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open. To experience Aero, you need a DirectX 9 compatible processor with arleast 128 MB of Video RAM. Also you cannot experience Aero "magic" if you have Windows Vista Home Basic on your machine.

Aero Features:

1. Taskbar thumbnails: See thumbnails of minimized application windows
2. Windows Flip: Visually nice Alt-Tab feature
3. Windows Flip 3D: See all open Windows in a 3D stack.
4. Nice sliding,gliding windows

Enjoy.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Snipping Tool to capture screenshots

Vista has this new feature to capture screenshots, Snipping Tool. No more Alt-Printscreen, saving to a file kind of hassels. With the Snipping Tool, you can use the mouse to select the image shape on the screen and snip it. There are following types of screen capture suppport:

1. Free-form Snip: For any type of irresular shapes like circles, ellipses...basically anything.
2. Rectangular Snip: For rectangle shapes.
3. Window Snip: All contents of a selected window.
4. Full-screen Snip: Entire screen will be captured.

Addition of this software into Vista is going to hurt the business of vendors who provide similar utilities. Well..it happens with every new release of Windows. People are going to debate if MS stuff is better than of those thirtd-party products, but for me, inbuilt apps do the normal jobs just fine.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

What does Vista mean? Interesting meanings...

I was wondering what the word "Vista" means. I found the following link which gives different meanings of this word in different languages.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=24869

To the author: Sanskrit is not yet "dead". May not be thriving but its pretty much alive in India atleast.

Whats a good enough hardware configuration for Windows Vista?

Software has always been hungry for hardware resources. Windows Vista is no different. A machine configuration for Windows XP may not be a good choice for running Vista. A machine with 1 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, graphics card with onboard RAM, 80GB harddisk would be decent enough to install and run Vista.

Important point to note here is that though an OS may not need lots of hardware resources to run, but the new applications for the OS may demand much more processor speed and memory. A good test would be to run Office applications to see how you machine performs. If you see apparent degradation from how the apps worked on XP, the new machine is simply not capable enough.

Running some benchmark tools may also help in deciding about new machine requirements. I used "Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor 1.0" from Microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=42B5AC83-C24F-4863-A389-3FFC194924F8&displaylang=en

It reported that my machine has:

  • good processor (P4 2.8GHz)
  • enough 1GB RAM

It reported that I should:

  • Increase hard disk space (minimum 15GB free) to install Vista.
  • Add a graphics card for better GUI experience (Windows Aero™ user experience)
  • Add a DVD drive.

Windows Vista released on Jan 30, 2007

Microsoft released Windows Vista to worldwide users on Jan 30th, 2007. Previous version Windows XP was released more than 5 years ago and a new version was expected for quite sometime now. During the development, Windows Vista was code-named as "Longhorn".

Only time will tell how Vista will be perceived by users. According to Microsoft, hundreds of new features have been added, with special focus to security aspects of the operating system.

Microsoft also released Office 2007 suite on the same day.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Windows Vista

This blog is the place where I am going to share my experiences with Windows Vista.

Do visit again for the latest news, tips, tricks and all the good stuff about Vista.

Thanks,
Parhar