Bits.Bytes.

My keenly awaited package from MSDN landed on Thursday and naturally I wasted no time in checking what was in it. Of keen interest were Windows Vista and Office 2007 Ultimate. Vista I don’t think I will let anywhere near my Toshiba notebook for a couple of reasons:

• Some of the essential things I use may not be fully supported on Vista. Visual Studio 2005 for instance!
• It took me MONTHS to install all the software and utilities I use. I am not willing to undergo it again!
• Specifications of said notebook are not encouraging

However I have a 3 Ghz Desktop with 1 GB of RAM and that I will be throwing Vista at, probably this weekend.

The Office 2007 however I am definitely interested in (and need working reliably as the beta will time out in February) and so after chugging through the install and consuming most of my remaining hard disk space, my office menu looks like this:

Groove will likely have ZERO use but who knows? All the rest I definitely use, and use regularly.

The first thing to test drive is Outlook. It’s not as snappy as 2003 to startup and already it has a few minor irritations. For starters the first time it ran it popped up this:

There is one thing very wrong with this dialog … what exactly is “a component for windows” that is missing? Come on guys!

Turns out that this component is Windows Desktop search. You’ll only know this if you click yes and it opens the site for you. I am perfectly happy with Google Desktop search so nothing got installed.

Thinking I was done I proceeded to proceed to import an old PST just to get a feel of the thing. Irritatingly, it looks like Outlook will nag me until the end of time until I install WDS. There is no way I can find to get rid of that obnoxious invitation to “click here to enable Instant Search“.

If you know how I can reclaim those few pixels, let me know!

One thing I’ll give full marks for — it looks gorgeous. But that instant search thing will not go away. It merrily simpers at you from the calendar

It merrily winks at you from the contacts

And it wags its fanny at you also from the task list

The RSS functionality is a good idea but for anyone with dozens of subscriptions it is absolutely and utterly useless because it does not allow you to read several items at once, the invaluable “newspaper view”. This alone makes it a non-starter for me.

A nice touch would be for the RSS feeds to use favicons instead of that generic folder. After 10 subscriptions it looks positively ugly. But that is a discussion for another day.

Anyway, this is just a first impression and not a review. But seriously — if you know how I can remove that annoying “Instant Search” business be a sport and let me know!

Another thing I’ve noticed — older plugins seem to work seamlessly. My NOD32 works like poetry, as does my GPG and my Google Desktop Search.