It’s been almost seven months since Windows Vista was released to retail customers, and so far, sales figures haven’t been that good, with an estimate of two years before Visa sales overtake those of XP.

Why all the trouble? With Vista being Microsoft’s first major OS release since XP debuted over five years ago, one would expect that people would be desperate for a change. Turns out, however, Vista doesn’t really offer much more in the way of practicality over XP. Furthermore, performance issues are perhaps the biggest flaw in Vista that is preventing its widespread adoption, despite other claimed reasons. For the average person, upgrading to Vista just isn’t worth it - and with the recent problems with WGA servers, people may end up having more than just resentment for Vista.

Performance

From a personal experience, performance thus far is the major reason I haven’t switched to Vista yet. There is a clear disadvantage to running games within Vista, which translates over to general use as well. Whether it’s due to immature drivers or Vista itself is debatable, but the end result is the same: a less-responsive experience for the user. When you’re paying money for something, getting less is a smack in the face.

From my own personal experience, Vista was noticeably sluggish on a three-year old system of mine, consisting of an AMD Athlon XP 2500, 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9500 Pro. After booting up, the OS would continually access the HDD, for reasons unknown. Applications felt less responsive, and I generally felt that I had moved to using a slower computer. This computer ran Windows XP with SP2 perfectly fine - no sluggishness and no constant HDD thrashing. I did, however, lose the Aero interface and the new window-switching-preview features.

The slowdowns and performance issues reported with Vista are not FUD by MS bashers - they are real, for the time being. Furthermore, the benefits that Vista offers, such as DX10, are of no direct benefit to me currently. (Gamers will also wonder why Vista is needed for DX10, when games currently run slower with it)

The future holds promise

With Vista SP1 in the works, things are looking better. A review of a leaked pre-release version yielded some interesting results. Generally, performance was increased quite a bit, with this quote summing it up:

There’s far less hard drive thrashing and in general the system seems much smoother and more responsive.

Though you could argue that MS should have corrected these flaws before the original release and not leave it for a service pack, it’s still nice to know that Vista will have this major error corrected. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be released until 2008.

Though, one should remember that XP also took a while to mature. It was only with SP2 that XP really gained the stability that an OS should have. I guess that’s an inherent problem with computer hardware being as complex and varied as it is nowadays - it can be hard to have an OS run perfectly on every single configuration. Hopefully SP1 for Vista won’t be delayed so that early adopters don’t have to suffer from sluggish performance and compatibility problems for much longer.

I recently begun to clean up and organize files on my desktop. It’s been about a year since I built it, so as you can image, there were files and documents scattered all over the HDD in various unorganized and cryptically-named folders. This chaotic mess of files was making it hard to find anything, even with search, so something had to be done. I endeavored to organize everything into the “My Documents” folder for easy access from a variety of programs, and then remembered why I’d stayed out of it in the first place - all the clutter that’s already there.

Preamble

What spawned this attempt at organization was my recent purchase of an additional 500 GB HDD. Not wanting it to fall into disorganization like the primary one, I decided I’d bring order from the start. Since I intended to use “My Documents” as a root for all of my stuff, I moved it off my Windows partition to the secondary HDD, so that it grow in size and not fill up my primary HDD. While the technical benefits from this might be mute, it does make things easier when you store all of your personal data on a separate drive or partition than your Windows one - if you ever need to reformat or reinstall, wiping the Windows partition won’t affect the partition your data is on.

Running into trouble

It was at this point that I noticed all the stuff that was already in My Documents, the reason that I never really used in the first place - it’s already too cluttered. Most games will put their save game files in “My Documents”, and while I’m not opposed to this (it makes backing up and finding your saved games easier), I don’t like how they’re stored there. Most games simply create a folder in the root of “My Documents”, so if you have a lot of games installed, your folder will already be cluttered. It would be much better if all them adhered to some sort of convention - for example, putting them in sub folder called “My Game Saves” or something similar. Strangely, some of them attempt to do so, such as Age of Empires 3, TES IV: Oblivion and Civilization 4, which put their save games in the “My Games” sub folder. But, it’s not consistent, even with the same publisher - for example, Flight Simulator X doesn’t follow the same convention as Age of Empires 3. (I realize I could probably move all the save games to their own sub folder and edit some games’ configuration files to reflect this, but it’d be a major PITA.)

Furthermore, applications also add their own folders to “My Documents”, such as Skype, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Widgets. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a good idea to pair application data with a user’s profile, I just have a problem with where it’s been put. Shouldn’t “My Documents” be for user-created data, such as their documents, photos and other files? A separate folder could be made to store all the data that is associated with games and applications. Perhaps this is just how my brain works. But, I like it when I can put all my important personal files in one folder, and then easily back that up to my external HDD regularly. Even if you have backup scheduling software, a setup like this would make things easier.

For now, I’m just going to create a sub-folder in “My Documents” called “Documents” that stores all my files, organized of course, into their own sub-folders.

Wait a minute!

Now, some of you will know that I’m no fan of Apple fanboys, (or fanboys in general), but Apple does get it right when it comes to usability - people generally find Macs easier to use, and more intuitive. While their current line of commercials (”Hello, I’m a Mac…”) may be annoying, they are in general correct for the majority of users who just want to “get things done”. This can be further seen in the success of the iPod - its control interface is second to none.

What’s wrong with the UI in Windows?

There’s nothing wrong with the UI in Windows - it works just fine for me, and I don’t find that it gets in the way when I’m trying to get things done. But, for some people, such things aren’t so intuitive, perhaps because they don’t live and breath computers like I do.

The quick launch bar that comes with Windows is okay, and so is the Start Menu - but an application Dock is bigger, more visible and thus is quicker to use for the average user, such as my Mom. (Though some would disagree)

The choices

It turns out there’s a lot of other people who also want a Dock like Apple’s in Windows, since there are a plethora of programs out there that accomplish this. The top three I found were MobyDock, RocketDock and Y’z Dock. I only had time to try out the first two, and there were many more that I didn’t bother to look at, but I was impressed.

Both programs support easy drag and drop operations, so you can add programs to the dock simply by dragging an existing shortcut onto it; removing the icons from the dock is just as easy. They can also be positioned virtually anywhere on the screen, with offsets from top/bottom/left/right being allowed. They also feature the nice “zoom” animations as featured on Apple’s version, and have a small memory footprint.

They’re also devoid of any confusing jumble of messy configuration dialogs - the settings pages are very simple and straightforward, and the apps “just work”, so you probably won’t need to even touch the configuration pages. This is the way software should work, at least software intended to be used by the masses. Too often, software comes with too many options pages, making configuration both confusing and tedious. Usability testing should be done to find out what’s intuitive, instead of making a bunch of cryptic settings.

Out of the two, MobyDock probably offered more features than RocketDock, offering built-in widgets for Weather, Screenshots and a Clock. However, it also seemed to be a bit buggy, as it crashed a few times, so I’ll be using RocketDock since it’s for the parents’ computer, and they don’t need to deal with that. MobyDock also seems to have stalled in development, with the latest version being put out way back on November 18th, 2003 - by contrast RocketDock still appears to be continually updated.

Kudos to the developers of these programs for not only making a useful piece of software, but also for making them freely availabe.