A few days ago, I finally took the plunge and installed Windows Vista on my desktop computer, as my primary operating system.  I had previously had Vista installed on my laptop, and I was dual-booting with XP.  Realistically, though, I found myself almost never booting into Vista, so I never had much of a chance to use it.  While I have been very, very happy with Windows XP, the main reason for installing Windows Vista was to get more familiar with it, as a lot of clients of mine have newer machines that have Vista installed.  And, let’s be honest:  Vista hasn’t exactly received the best press.  So I wanted to find out for myself is Vista was a bomb, or if it really was a worthy operating system.

Anyway, I’m just going to share some of my early impressions, the good and the bad so far.  Just for reference, I installed Windows Vista Home Premium, and my computer has an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 processor with two gigabytes of RAM.  For safety, I installed Vista on a totally separate hard drive from XP, so if I want to go back to Windows XP, I can just switch the boot order.

So, first impressions here, starting off with the good:

• Aesthetics.  Vista is definitely prettier than XP, in my opinion.  Now, to be honest, I found myself turning off some of the extras.  I quickly reverted back to a classic start menu and classic control panel.  I do like how Windows Aero Glass looks, and Flip 3D is kind of a nice alternative to Alt + Tab.  It sure looks nice, although I doubt I’ll be using it often, as I prefer the speed of the old Alt + Tab for program switching.
• Driver Support.  Vista seemed to be able to automatically download and install drivers for all of my hardware, including my Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card, my memory card reader, and my Hauppage WinTV-PVR 1500 MCE video capture card.  Pretty nice!  It even automatically installed my Brother MFC-3360 all-in-one printer that was connected via USB.  Good job, Vista!
• Windows Media Center.  I’ve got to say, I’m pretty impressed with WMC!  It’s very pretty, and, again, it was a cinch to set up.  As Vista had already loaded the drivers for my capture card, including the USB infrared receiver and the IR blaster, it was a piece of cake to get up and running with Windows Media Center.  Even my remote control worked great.
• New Sound Mixer.  This is actually genius.  The new mixer in Vista allows you to control the volume separately for each running program!  So you can mute any given program or tweak the volume.  I didn’t even know this existed, but once I opened up the mixer I saw this.  It’s a pretty good idea, and I had never even thought of it previously.
• Speed.  My computer is pretty fast, so speed hasn’t been an issue, yet.  It isn’t noticeably slower than XP, although, to be fair, I haven’t really done too much in the way of testing things.  But so far, everything is nice and speedy.
• Error Reporting.  After my introductory Blue Screen Of Death, Vista notified me that the problem seemed to be associated with the driver for my graphics card.  I appreciated that!  It made it nice and easy to find out what caused the crash.

Now, for some of the things that I’m not so crazy about:

• Windows Explorer.  It has a funky new layout, and I just do not like it.  For one, I feel like it wastes so much space at the top of the window.  On top of that, it just… I don’t know.  I miss the old Explorer.  I bet there’s a way to get the old layout back, but I haven’t found it yet with clicking around a little bit.
• Stability.  I have had one BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death).  I think it was related to my Nvidia graphics card, though, so it’s possible that this isn’t really Microsoft’s “fault.”  I should go and download the latest driver from Nvidia, though.  Also, to be fair, this BSOD was prior to me installing Vista Service Pack 1.  Since then, I haven’t had any additional crashes.
• (Not Responding).  This is a big annoyance.  For some reason, it seems like windows (especially Windows Explorer) are very quick to fade out and add “(Not Responding)” in the title bar, even when they haven’t crashed.  In my past experiences with XP, the “(Not Responding)” pretty much meant that I had to manually kill the program — that is, I had no hopes of it recovering.  But with Vista, it seems like certain programs will eventually snap out of it, after doing some heavy processing.  So it just seems like Vista is a little too fast to assume that there is a problem, and so if I didn’t know better I might end up terminating some applications that would be just fine had I waited a little longer.
• User Account Control.  This got to be a bothersome in a hurry, all of the “Are you sure you want to do this?” warnings of UAC.  I understand the idea behind it, but it just got irritating to run into that prompt whenever I wanted to do anything!  I currently have it disabled, just so it will stop bothering me.  When I have the time, though, I may try to find a way to re-enable it but prevent it from bugging me so often.  It does get kind of extreme.
• Compatibility.  So far, there has been one program that I have installed that no longer works correctly in Windows Vista.  The program is Sorenson Squeeze 4.3, a program that converts videos.  I guess this is not necessarily Vista’s fault, but I’m bummed that this version of the program doesn’t work with Vista, while it works fine in XP.
• Network Activity Icon.  Okay, this is something that really bugs me.  In Windows XP, the system tray icons that show network activity (the single computer monitor for a wireless connection, or the double monitors for a wired connection) are very noticeable, very easy to keep an eye on, to watch for network activity.  For some reason, Vista’s new network-activity icons are very, very hard to read — that is, there is very little difference in the indicator lights, making it real difficult to tell if there is any traffic.  I honestly don’t know why they made this change.  Hopefully I’ll find a way to replace those icons with ones that are easier to read.

So these are some different things that I have noticed after playing around with Vista for a few days.  All in all, it has been a pretty positive experience.  We’ll see what happens once I have a month or two of usage under my belt.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 1:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.