A new Vista users thoughts...

I just bought and installed Vista Home Premium x64, I've been running it for a few days now and I quite like it. I've had no issues with hardware and drivers.

Although, two things that don't sit well with me are the start menu and the disk defragger.

The start menu, in particular games, is messy and inconsistant. Games are placed in the games folder/menu and that would be fine if it did it for all games but it only puts some games there. Secondly, if a game is in the games folder, it never appears in the recently used list in the start menu. This I don't like at all. It means that the recently used list pretty much all windows programs that I rarely use. Some games are in the games folder only, some are in the games folder and the all programs list and some are in the all programs list and recently used list but not in the games folder...? Also if you delete a desktop shortcut the icon in the recently used list doesn't work as it is pointing at the desktop shortcut that is not longer there instead of the actual executable.

I feel that the start menu in Vista has been ruined in an attempt to make it more sophisticated than that of Xp. In general though, Vista IS more sophisticated and does make using windows better and easier but being that the start menu is such an integral part of day to day use, it's really something that shouldn't have failed.

The defragger: i'm trying to understand how this thing works if it works at all. Very confusing! If you manually start it, the defrag process never ends and yet if you kill it after hours and hours then run a 3rd party defragger it will say that the drive is still fragmented. If it's a low level background process why doesn't it just run all the time with no gui?

Anyway, apart from thsoe two mind boggling things, I really like Vista - It looks cool.

Agreed about the defragger without visual and being endless. I am using Diskeeper developed by the same people who developed MS defragger. What so great about it is that once it is installed, you forget all about it while it is working on the back ground.
Also it is not using any computing resource.

Hi,

Vista Defrag is designed to run at a very low level in the background so you can work over it. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to speed it up.

It skips any fragmented files 64mb or less, as it figures they are not worth defragging - so when you run another defrag tool you see all those fragments
It is quite frustrating , but it is efficient.

If you want to use a 3rd party app. the free auslogics defrag is very popular

www.auslogics.com


SIW2

There is a program called Start++
BrandonTools

This might help you.
Why can't you type the name of the game in the search instead of clicking through folders.
in search i type cry and push enter and crysis turns on.

bruce2 said:

Agreed about the defragger without visual and being endless. I am using Diskeeper developed by the same people who developed MS defragger. What so great about it is that once it is installed, you forget all about it while it is working on the back ground.
Also it is not using any computing resource.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info on diskeeper, I'll give it a go. It kind of sounds like the MS defragger in a way as it doesn't use much PC resources either.

SIW2 said:

Hi,

Vista Defrag is designed to run at a very low level in the background so you can work over it. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to speed it up.

It skips any fragmented files 64mb or less, as it figures they are not worth defragging - so when you run another defrag tool you see all those fragments
It is quite frustrating , but it is efficient.

If you want to use a 3rd party app. the free auslogics defrag is very popular

www.auslogics.com


SIW2

Click to expand...

I didn't know that about the skipping of said files. Maybe I should just let it run on a schedule. The Auslogic defragger was the 3rd party app that I tried and yeah it seems pretty good :-)

SWAT said:

There is a program called Start++
BrandonTools

This might help you.
Why can't you type the name of the game in the search instead of clicking through folders.
in search i type cry and push enter and crysis turns on.

Click to expand...

Well after i started this thread I tried sending a shortcut to the desktop of all my games executables then running them from that shortcut. I ended up with all of them in the recently used list and they still worked after I deleted the desktop shortcuts. All I had to do after that was rename the icons in the start menu from "Play" to "<game name>". So now Vista is happy with it's little games folder and I'm happy because I have my icons in the recently used list. :D