I took the leap yesterday and installed Vista (5472) and Office 12 (4228) on my main machine (a Toshiba Tecra M4 Tablet).  Although it's still been less than 24 hours, I've been very impressed so far.  Both builds seem very stable and already I'm seeing some gains over my old setup.

My initial impressions:

Installaton – I used WDS (Windows Deployment Services) to install the build, which worked really well (although a rogue Thinkpad driver crept into the build and needed to be disabled shortly after installation).  Windows Update in 5472 is good, although a little "hidden" for my liking.  It took me a couple of minutes to dig through the control panel to find it in order to get the drivers for my machine.

Display - The Tecra M4 comes with an NVidia 6200 graphics card (128M) – after finding the right driver online, the machine now has a 3.0 performance rating, and Aero glass works really well.

Gadgets – I'll admit, I was a little skeptical when I first heard about Gadgets in Vista, but I think they are going to be cool.  I'm not one for displaying clocks, slideshows, or other such things on my desktop, so I quickly turned off the default selection – but I think custom-built, RSS "powered" gadgets will be very useful (and popular) once they start to appear.  My favorite out of the default set today is the CPU load gadget.  Much more entertaining than keeping taskmgr minimized in the system tray.

Tablet – I still need to work out the automatic rotate feature on the Tecra.  Screen orientation is supported in this build, but detection of "going into tablet mode" looks to be a feature of the Toshiba driver set that isn't there yet.  I believe there is a tool called iRotate that may provide this functionality until Toshiba release a new driver set.

Performance - I've been pleasantly surprised that the performance of this build is actually better than my old Windows XP setup.  Ok, my old XP setup was in desperate need of a rebuild, but even so…   Standby and Hibernate seem to be working well in 5472 on the Tecra – although I did see one glitch this morning (I think it had to do with a 2nd hard disk I was trying to plug in at the same time).

Security – When I played around with an earlier build of Vista (on a VPC) I thought I would get annoyed at the constant "do you want to allow this?" dialog boxes as part of Vista LUA.  Having gone through many of these while installing stuff yesterday (even logged in as admin on the machine), they require extra time, but after a while I found myself left with a good feeling that I'd quickly know if something rogue was being installed.  In a strange way, I'm actually becoming a fan of this feature…

Breadcrumb Navigation – Many explorer windows now support a "breadcrumb" navigation where you can quick navigate using "breadcrumbs", but then select all the breadcrumbs and copy the physical path – very cool.

Launching Programs - On XP, I used to run (and love) SlickRun to launch programs.  The Start Menu has a way of quickly searching for things, but I don't know whether it's possible to customize it with a set of shortcuts (which I really need) – it looks like I may be able to use “pinned” menus on the start menu providing I can make them work with parameters.

Handwriting Support - Really works well – much better than XP from what I've seen.

Other Apps - I've still lots to install, but no incompatibilities yet.  Foldershare is working well (and currently updating my libraries as I write this).

That's it for now – as I said, just the first impressions after a few hours of use.  I'm sure I'll have more to say as I start loading all my applications…

*** Updated video driver section – found updated driver (see comments) ***

I've been playing around with the "photo montage" effect in Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer.  This effect lets you stitch together multiple photos to form one image – all done automatically.  Here's an image I created with 9 separate photos from my hotel window in Shinjuku (Japan) last week.

(Click on the image for more detail)

I have a Toshiba Tecra M4 with 2Gb of RAM.  I've had the machine for a while now and every so often, when I went to hibernate I would see a message saying "Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API" (and the machine would only go into standby).  On a couple of occasions I've failed to notice this before placing the machine in my bag (and as a result I end up with a hot bag, an even hotter laptop and not much battery left).

After researching this yesterday, it appears that this is a problem with memory fragmentation (a lot of applications running causes memory fragmentation which for some reason prevents the machine/kernel from going into hibernation – this affects laptops with > 1Gb RAM).

Fortunately, this seems to be have been fixed with a post-SP2 patch.  (KB909095).  You have to contact Microsoft Product Support for the actually patch file, but it is now available – and from what I can tell appears to work well… 

* Update – minor correction to @find shortcut posted *

I'm a great believer in "re-use but not repetition" and an avid fan of shortcuts that help me in my day-to-day work in front of the screen.  Recently I've been looking at how WSH scripts combined with MSN Desktop Search can be used to save even more time.  I thought I'd share three of my most used scripts…  To use these, copy the snippet to a .VBS file and register as a shortcut.  For example:

@find, =c:myscriptsfind.vbs $w

Here they are:

Finding contacts in Outlook

Frequently I want to search for contacts in the GAL – without having to ALT-TAB to Outlook, type the name in the address field etc.  Using this find WSH script I can just type:

find Bill Gates

…in the MSN Desktop Search toolbar to popup the contact from Outlook.  Here's the code snippet.

Set wShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
wShell.AppActivate(" Microsoft Outlook")
WScript.Sleep 200
wShell.SendKeys("^+i")
WScript.Sleep 200
wShell.SendKeys("%c")
WScript.Sleep 100
wShell.SendKeys("{RIGHT}{RIGHT}{RIGHT}{RIGHT}{DOWN}")
WScript.Sleep 100
alias = WScript.Arguments.Item(0)
newAlias = Replace(alias,"+"," ")
wShell.SendKeys(newAlias & "{ENTER}")

Finding an address in Mappoint

You are on the phone and someone gives you an address – wouldn’t it be nice to just type this into MSN Desktop Search toolbar to display a map?  Now you can with this address WSH script:

addr 1 Microsoft Way Redmond WA

This launches the Mappoint MSN site with the requested address.  Here's the code:

Set wShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Dim statePresent
Dim street
Dim splitStreet(5)
Dim city
Dim state
statePresent = 0

arguments = Split(WScript.Arguments.Item(0),"+")

if Len(arguments(Ubound(arguments))) = 2 then
 statePresent = 1
end if
  
splitStreet(0) = arguments(0)
For f = 1 to UBound(arguments) -1 – statePresent
 splitStreet(f) = "+" & arguments(f)
Next
street = Join(splitStreet)

city = arguments(UBound(arguments) – statePresent )

state = "WA"
if (statePresent = 1) then
 state = arguments(UBound(arguments))
end if

wShell.Exec("c:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore http://maps.msn.com/home.aspx?strt1=" & street & "&city1=" & city & "&stnm1=" & state)

Overloading the Run command

Finally, I needed a quick way of setting focus to the MSN Desktop Search bar.  Before using the toolbar to get the usual Windows Run dialog box displayed I used to press CTRL-ESC and then R.  To achieve the same with MSN Desktop Search, remove the Run command from the start menu and use this script to set focus to the MSN Desktop Search Window instead:

Set wShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
wShell.SendKeys("^%m")