As with most people, when Vista was first released/announced, I was skeptical. Perhaps it was the rather high system requirements compared to XP, or, far more likely, the fact that I was running a 350Mhz K6-2 at the time that didn’t have a hope in hell of running it, but I hated it. In truth, I also hated Windows XP before I used/ran it.

I’ve used Vista on my main machine for quite some time now, and I didn’t realize how “used to” it I had become, until I went to do something in an XP Virtual Machine, and, without thinking, I pressed Windows Key, and typed a few letters, before I realized I was running XP. For a few moments I was completely disallusioned, and even said (out loud) how the hell did I do this before the search bar?

I finally remembered that I had to literally dig down through either the start menu All Programs Folder or actually get to the document or file manually through windows explorer.

I start nearly every program with the search bar, actually, except for those whose starting actions has become engrained in my mind (cmd prompt used to be in that category, but I had to change it in order to run as administrator if that is necessary).

It’s really an amazing feature that is bashed way to often. In fact I recently discovered yet another use for it- the Search bar in windows explorer that until today I had largely ignored. I was looking for something… and simply typed part of the name in the search bar (after changing to the drive and folder) and poof- there it was. Search completed. It almost felt wrong to not have to drop to the cmd shell to perform some dir /b | find “whatever” commands.

which translates, I suppose- to “the shell was doing it’s job”.

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