After you've emptied the Recycle Bin, the following command line goodness will help you:
cipher /W: Removes data from available unused disk space on the entire volume.
Vista has had a lot of bad press in the blogosphere recently. So imagine my surprise when a) someone actually said something nice about it and b) that someone works for Adobe (Mr Ben Forta)!
Vista takes a little getting used to. Some of the utilities and tools are buried in places other than where they used to be, but that's easily learned. The new UI is slick, the new Windows Explorer replacement is superb, Wi-Fi support is orders of magnitude improved, printer support is close to perfect (it scanned my network, found them, added them, just the way it's supposed to work!), when I plugged in a projector the screen auto-switched cleanly and simply, the peripherals I have thrown at it (cameras, microphones, SD readers, and more) have just worked, performance has been great ... truth be told, I have yet to run into a single real problem yet. And this is not even a new laptop or one designed for Vista, it's the ThinkPad T43P that I got before the ColdFusion MX 7 launch in early 2005. Everything thus far has just worked, and worked really well. As one of my co-workers teased, my laptop is now behaving like a Mac, and maybe it is. ;-)
I have to say my experiences mirror Ben's (including my surprise at how easy adding printers is). Boring but true.
A while ago Kev posted a comment here about this paper that talks about Content Protection in Vista. There is now an official reply here by Dave Marsh who's the guy that now owns video in the core OS (good guy.. once worked for Snell & Willcox).
Bottom line is that a) any OS that wants to legally play commercial content in new HD formats will have to do something similar b) when you play regular unprotected content, all of these mechanisms are switched off.
As you'd expect, there is the predictable fuss about this from the peanut gallery. As a consumer, I'm glad that I can play HD-DVDs on my PC. That doesn't mean I like the increased layers of DRM that have been mandated. I'm also not so glad that, when I put an HD-DVD disc into my DVD player it can potentially re-flash the firmware of the device if the device is on a list of compromised players. But that's the world we now live in thanks to widespread piracy.
Want to see a real-world WPF App? Check this out.. a version of Yahoo Messenger written in WPF. There is a video and you can sign up for availability notifications.
With all the talk of Post-Vista wishes, here is my list:
1) Live Thumbnails work with minimized windows
The Vista "live" thumbnails feature is great. Try running a video and mousing over the tab in the taskbar or doing alt tab. The thumbnails update in realtime. The only problem is that when you minimize a window (eg a file copy progress window), the live preview stops working. It would be really nice if a window could be set a flag that would enable it to repaint even when minimized so that progress bars would remain live always.
2) IE RSS reading improvements
I like the RSS platform. I do all my feed reading in IE7 now-adays. A "River of News" view across all feeds would be nice. Make it easy to sync my feeds with Windows Live. Support for the Well Formed Web commenting API / comment feeds.
3) Better Podcatching support
Make Windows Media Player and Zune aware of podcasts / video podcasts that have been downloaded by the RSS platform.
4) Multiple desktops
The concept of multiple desktops has been around for ever. I want to park email, task management functions on one desktop and run dev tools on another; and be able to switch between groups on the fly.
5) More DCM eye candy
Where did the wobbly windows go? They were shown back at an early WinHEC as a poof-of-concept demo. Then XGL came along. Oh, and why can't I push less important windows away from me in z space.. i.e. push them into the background but have them still running live and rendered smaller. (BTW there is a great white paper on how the DCM works here).
6) Replace Paint with Paint.NET
Seriously. Enough is enough.
7) Make the Zip compression support in the shell more, well, Zippy. It is currently too slow.
8) Make the taskbar work better at large sizes. Wish the globe and tab height would scale up correctly
9) Make Powershell a standard feature
so I can walk up to any "Windows 7" machine and use a modern, object pipe command shell.
10) AutoBlog.
Dictate an outline for a blogpost and have the machine write it out long hand while the author sidles off for a crafty Gears of War multiplayer session ;-)
What's on your list?