Vista's bad press

My previous post could have been interpreted as me bashing Vista. Let me make this clear: I like Vista a lot, much more than XP. It is especially nice with Service Pack 1, but was fine even before.

In moving to Vista, Microsoft obviously tried to sometimes hide features used by power users (which is fine by me). However, they sometimes got it wrong, and it is not always obvious to tell where things are.

This was already the case for a few things in XP; well, in Vista this is sometimes better, sometimes worse. The UI inconsistencies (remnants from Windows 95 and XP, mixed with the new UI that Vista introduced) certainly do not help.

Instead of making some of the powerful and useful features of the system easily discoverable, they just get relegated to some tab in a dialog (yes, I am again thinking of Previous Versions).

It turns out that if you look at it a bit too quickly, Vista just seems to be XP with a more modern theme and too high requirements to warrant installing.

Could this be one of the reasons it gets such bad press?

Get ready: a few forthcoming posts will try to show you some nice features of Vista.

The most unobvious UI?

More often than not, after some time spent using Windows Vista, you will notice that it provides many features of other OSes, sometimes even more powerful. However they happen to be difficult to discover, or downright hidden (on purpose?).

One feature that comes immediately to mind is Previous Revisions (based on the Shadow Copy service), which in some ways may be compared to Mac OS X Leopard Time Machine. We will get back to that greatly undervalued feature of Windows Vista in a future post.

But here is (so far) the most hidden piece of UI I have seen in Windows Vista. It is so unobvious that I even thought that the feature that previously was available in Windows XP had actually been removed (in XP it was already kind of unobvious already); the feature in question is the Virtual Private Network (VPN) server.

Actually, not that many people know that it is possible to define an incoming connection in Windows XP that uses the PPTP protocol (port 1723). Other computers may then connect to that VPN securely over the Internet (for example, using the built-in PPTP client built into Windows XP or Vista).

So this is how you create a new incoming VPN connection in Vista:

• Go to the Network and Sharing Center
• Click Manage network connections

Now, this is where it should have been obvious. Look at the list of network connections, and at the list of available options. Do you see it?

No.

But it is right there. What you have to do is hit the Alt key to make the menu bar appear (it is hidden by default), and then open the File menu. Do you see it now?

• Click File / New Incoming Connection...

 and there you go! What is really bad in this is that:

1. it should really be possible to create a new incoming connection by clicking Set up a connection or network in the Network and Sharing Center
2. the command to create a new incoming connection should not (only) be a menu item, but should also be available as a text link or a toolbar button.

Why did they hide it so well?