Vista #3 Vista #3

I am still getting used to Windows Vista. One of the nice new features is the Side Bar. It allows you to load up one side of your screen with "gadgets". Currently, I have three clocks, showing Mountain, Pacific, and Eastern time, followed by two weather gadgets showing the weather in Dillon and Golden. Then, I have tasks and calender items from Outlooks, followed by RSS feeds from a bunch of web sites. Finally, I have some performance gadgets on the bottom. I have their opacity set to the minimum so that they don't distract me, but when I put the cursor over them, they fully appear. Pretty slick.

One big problem with gadgets is that most of them that reference Office, reference Office 2007 only, and I am not about to pay for that as long as Office 2003 works just fine. Besides, it appears that Microsoft has reorganized their look and feel even more than it did Windows with Vista. I have spent a decade or so getting a good system working with the various Office programs, with menus and button bars that expedite my work. I am not about to throw that away until I have to.

Final problem though is that the bizarre security system in Vista can't figure out that shortcuts to its own products should be treated the same as the underlying products. So, if I create a shortcut to a Microsoft product and then click on it, Vista makes me verify that it is legitimate before executing it. Come on guys, if you can't trust your own software, you shouldn't be selling it.