Vista Review

So, I dove in and installed the first release candidate of Vista. It's not the devils incarnate that some might like you to believe. It's pretty smooth, although some may not see the advantages to the new OS.

Hardware:
P4 2.8Ghz w/ HT
512mb PC3200 RAM
Mobility Radeon 9600 128mb

Installing was pretty simple. Throw in the DVD and either start the install from windows, or restart and boot from the DVD. Vista said I didn't meet the requirements to upgrade, but I didn't have to reformat. It copied my old files and settings to a different folder, and then installed Vista, so nothing was lost. I did backup my things before all this though, just to be safe.

Once you're in, you're greeted by the welcoming center, which has icons for various tasks. Only a couple things didn't work as "plug and play", and that was my sound and mouse touchpad. After installing video drivers, which were surprisingly available from ATI, I was also able to use the Aero interface. Sound I was also able to get to work after installing the appropriate drivers.

Attempting to install drivers for my touchpad gave interesting results. At first the installation said I needed Windows XP/2000 to install, and then exited. Vista came up and said the installation failed, and asked if I would like to try again with recommended settings, and so I did, and it installed. Upon restarting though, Vista told me there was a known issue with the touchpad I installed, and even attempted to find a solution, but alas, none is to be found.

The security is a bit bothersome, in that just about every time a program wants to run, a popup will come up asking if it’s ok for it to run. I have yet to find how, or if, I could turn this elevated level of protection down.

The performance was very acceptable, although, with just Windows and a couple of programs, a great portion of my RAM was used. I haven’t bothered to figure out what I could turn off or disable to free up resources.

I liked the way the navigation of folder has changed, and it is much quicker to bounce around between folders. I also like the options for managing images, and the programs Vista includes for organizing and editing images.

Vista includes extensive parental controls which allow parents to track and control everything a user does from webpage’s visited to programs run.

Vista comes with a nifty screen-capture program which many may find easy to use, although may be hard to break the habit of going into paint.

Alt-tab has a nice overhaul which shows a preview of the open windows. I discovered that holding the control key before letting go of tab, and then alt, will keep the window selection open.

Windows also offers a fancier version of it, which is accessible by pressing windows key and tab, and you can cycle through the windows with tab, the arrow keys, or the scroll wheel of the mouse. Once again, pressing control will allow you to let go of all the keys to keep it on the screen. You can also use the mouse to click any window visible in this selection.

With the Aero interface on, window animations are very smooth and graceful. When a window is maximized, the title bar will loose its transparency effect though. The transparency color can be chosen from the theme settings control panel. Logging in and out, and the transition to and from screensaver are done gracefully with a fade to black and back transition.

Vista includes extensive hardware monitoring features, so you know exactly what is being used, what’s hold up the system, etc… It also offers many monitoring tools including reliability monitor which will (ideally) allow you to see upcoming hardware failures, or see what is failing. It could also be used to see what piece of hardware is the bottleneck.

Overall, Vista is a nice improvement upon XP, though it is nothing earth shattering to the naked eye, or in the short-term. I’m sure over time as more applications get released for it, and more people use it, we will see the true advantages of Vista.

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