I've been using Vista for a while now on my laptop and second desktop at work. I don't actually use those machines very often, which is why I haven't mentioned my experiences with Vista up to now.
At the company meeting Thursday, they highlighted some features that I think are absolutely amazing.
When you click the Vista Ball to pick a program, you can just start typing the name of your program. So, for instance, to open Live Writer (which I'm using to write this post), I hit the little button, then typed 'writer'. When the Windows Live Writer shortcut was highlighted, I hit enter. Live Writer opened up, and I started typing. This doesn't seem important until you get a bajillion items in your start menu (Mike). You can do a full 'contains' search on your entire program menu.
The second feature that amazes me is the Reliability Monitor. This is an amazing feature for network admins. I am shocked that MSFT hasn't pushed this feature more in the news and in marketing messages. We are getting beat up in the press all the time, but we don't talk about these little features that our customers are going to love. The reliability monitor keeps track of all types of system failures and such. That's not too amazing, the great part is that it also keeps track of all installations. So, when your mom (or father-in-law) calls you and tells you that her computer suddenly got slow for no reason, and started crashing, you can go back and see exactly what she installed that caused the problem. I think this feature is going to blow the socks off of all the network admins in the smaller companies around the world; I certainly could have used it while I was doing that job.
