UMPC Explorers! | Ultranauts.com » Vista on a UMPC

As promised, this is part 2 of Vista on a UMPC – The Good, the Bad and the Utilities. Today we look at the Bad.

I hate the new All Programs menu system on the button formerly known as Start. (What do we call it now?). It’s slow. The design reminds me of another app with a crappy interface (cough…ADP…cough). It’s harder (if that’s possible) to move stuff around and actually get it where you want it on the menu.
Moving small files is ridiculously slow. I’ve seen it take 10-15 seconds to move a 3k file because it has to load the pretty window, show the progress bar and shut down. Give us an option to control the GUI please. It’s worse than XP now!
Too many windows are still not formatted for the small screen. (There are ways around this that will be covered in Utilities)
I get errors that don’t seem to affect anything (com surrogate has disconnected blah blah blah). I get an error. Everything seems to work ok. It’s weird.
Sidebar behavior is strange when moving from external screen to internal screen. When going from 1280 x 1024 to 800 x 480 the order of my sidebar items moves around. I understand them moving off screen but their location in relation to one another changes.
Disk thrashing has been well covered but seems to have subsided with registry changes. (More in Utilities)
Battery Life is an issue for some but doesn’t seem to be for me.
You still can’t easily see the size of a folder. You can hover over a folder and see its size, but when my dinky 40 gig hard drive is low on space, I don’t want hover over every freaking folder to find the black hole that’s sucked up my bits. It’s also really slow for big folders. The Folder Size utility doesn’t work with Vista. There are alternatives but this should be built in. Oh yeah. Vista is 10 gigs. Do the math for the 30 gig SSD drive and see if the extra speed and battery life are worth it.
A few vendor specific things are definitely NOT Vista optimized. On the Q1, the menu button/volume combination that controls brightness, only reduces brightness. The Samsung menu can be painfully slow to come up. I still can’t view an external screen while writing on the tablet. All of these I believe to be driver issues that will get fixed. I’m just happy to have drivers.
I’ve not had good luck with the Origami Experience. It crashes the 3 or 4 times I’ve used it. I’m hoping now that everything has settled down from the install that it will work better. 2 gigs of RAM may help too. The UPS guy arrived while I was typing this.