Friday, April 13, 2007

What's up with Vista Enterprise?

I've been on Vista Enterprise on my corporate laptop for a while, and a friend just got Vista Ultimate, so he's going through and finding some cool Vista tidbits.


One of them is the Snipping Tool, which looked to be in Vista Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate, but not Home Basic nor Enterprise, or so I thought. My initial reaction was confusion, as I thought Vista Enterprise was to Business as Ultimate was to Home Premium.

I mean, (performance wise) the bits are the same - the features are what define the edition.

I use the tried-and-true Alt-Prnt Scrn for screenshots/dialog captures, so I was slightly disappointed that my system didn't have what sounded like a cool program.

After some poking around, it turns out that Enterprise DOES support the Snipping Tool. As pointed out by Spaghetti, the Snipping Tool falls under Tablet PC Support, which defaults to disabled in Vista Enterprise.





After checking the box and a few moments of configuring...make that a few minutes of configuring...I'm golden! I'll definitely be using this.

But why wasn't it enabled by default? I would think that "Enterprise users" would want more productivity-increasers and would be savvy enough to not be overwhelmed by feature inundation, but who knows.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is just bizarre positioning by Microsoft to consider the Snippet Tool as a Tablet PC-only item.

I don't get it.

Trey said...

Agreed! I used it for the graphic on the post above and I really like it!

The "greying out" of the background before you define an area to snip reminds me of the shading in Photoshop's Crop tool, which I really like.

I have no idea how this app could be considered Tablet PC only, or even how a Tablet PC would gain that much more of a benefit of using this over a non-Tablet PC.