As I travel around a lot of people see me running Windows Vista and are surprised. Often the comment is something like 'How can you run Vista and still be productive?'. I am the first to admit that there were challenges to start with. However these challenges had more to do with change than anything else. The fact of the matter was I knew XP inside out and Vista was different, so all of a sudden someone moved my cheese and I had no idea how to configure my network settings let alone configure Reporting Services to run on Vista. That's not to say that I haven't had some pain adapting to the change, as I remember one night before a presentation I was about to throw my laptop out the window as I was having all sorts of difficulty ensuring that a Reporting Services demo would work.
Recently the lease on my Subaru Forester came up and I leased another Forester. I was always particularly fond of having the volume control on the right hand side of the radio as it was within easy reach when my favourite song came on. However the new Forester has the volume on the left hand side of the radio which is not quite as convenient, meaning I sometimes miss the first few lines of a song being at volume 10. So am I going to downgrade my new car just because the volume is in a different spot – of course not. Instead I found out that there is a volume button on my steering wheel which is actually a better option than before, however I just need to get used to reaching for the steering wheel instead of the radio.
The more and more I use Vista, the more of these little features that I find. I have often used Norton Ghost and more recently Drive Snapshot to back up my laptop's. I have used these programs as they provide the ability for me to mount the backup as a drive which I can then copy a file from when needed. Over the weekend I decided to re-build my main laptop and decided to give the backup in Windows Vista a shot. To my surprise when I created a full backup the backup was a VHD. Meaning I could simply copy the file to any machine and fire up Virtual PC and use it as though I was sitting on my laptop. I even have the option of using Vhdmount in Virtual Server to mount the VHD as a drive.
So just because the volume control has moved it doesn't mean that you should start looking for a new car.