Well build 5472 of Vista continues to unveil it’s secrets to me. Or rather I keep finding new bits. Bits that I like. Ok, so, here in turn are my latest discoveries.
Windows Experience Index - How big is yours?
So mine is 2.7 huh? And it was my crummy memory that let me down. All 1GB of it! The Windows Experience index is supposed to provide an indication of how well you’re PC will run with Vista on it. I ran the wizard and it told me that it was 2.7. Now I have no idea if 2.7 is good or not. The help file refers to 2.6 but doesn’t say if that’s average or bad. Anyway, my graphics card was best a whopping 5.6 (still don’t know if that’s good or not) but for a 3 year old ATI Radeon 9700 Pro it’s not doing bad by the looks of it. As a result of the 2.7 information I decided to run the help wizard. That’s when I became even more impressed!
Guided Help - You following yet?
Guided help is a real gem. When it kicks in using a ’show me’ button it really does know kung fu. Areas of the screen are highlighted and a larger cursor points out what to do accompanied by some nice on screen text. If I was clever I’d capture it as some video and upload it to YouTube or something. But I’ll let someone else do that. This is very good and you only get asked if you definitely want to change something (which also kicks in the related security dialogue as the Guided Help program clearly has the power to change your setting on your PC). All in all, quite impressive. I’m sure Microsoft will publish the API for this as it really is a cool feature and would be very useful in some shockingly complicated applications like SAP and such like.
Which brings me to the final nugget.
Xbox 360 Media Center - they’ve only gone and made it work in this version!
I posted previously about trying to get Media Center from Vista working onto my Xbox 360. I was met last time with cries of ‘Your region code is invalid’ and I was left downtrodden and slightly pi$$ed. But no. Step forward the latest build and it only goes and works! The wizard worked, the connection worked and Media Center from Vista Ultimate appears on my TV screen via my Xbox 360. Wow! I thought. But the wow factor ended there. It soooo unresponsive. Using my 360 remote I press up and about 15 seconds later the menu moves up! What’s going on. I even rearranged my furniture and put my wireless router in a different place to see if the signal strength was having something to do with it. I now have enough signal to broadcast HDTV content according to Media Center’s metwork wizard. But Media Center is still very unresponsive. I shall experiment further.
So there you have it. Three new things along with the death of the hourglass. Seems that the death of the hourglass though has not meant the death of waiting for stuff to happen on Vista. Oh well.
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[...] ACW does kung fu Here’s a fun review of ACW. PS. I’m going to put together a post that covers the authoring experience soon (as it stands today). James Guided Help - You following yet? Guided help is a real gem. When it kicks in using a ’show me’ button it really does know kung fu. Areas of the screen are highlighted and a larger cursor points out what to do accompanied by some nice on screen text. If I was clever I’d capture it as some video and upload it to YouTube or something. But I’ll let someone else do that. This is very good and you only get asked if you definitely want to change something (which also kicks in the related security dialogue as the Guided Help program clearly has the power to change your setting on your PC). All in all, quite impressive. I’m sure Microsoft will publish the API for this as it really is a cool feature and would be very useful in some shockingly complicated applications like SAP and such like. [...]