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March 5, 2007
Vista Impressions
There's a lot of static electricity in my apartment. Like a LOT especially when I'm wearing my slippers. Electricity likes to find the shortest path to the ground. One of those paths, apparently, is via my computer keyboard.
Whoops.
All of a sudden, one day my computer refused to hibernate or standby reliably. My best guess at the time was that it was software related, but there was some fresh funkiness going on in general. You can see that a couple posts back. And I had a license of Vista I could use, for free. Vista Business. So I figured - what the hell, I'd install Vista on my laptop.
After some extensive backups to external harddrives and DVDs I formatted and reinstalled, wiping out my XP install and my Ubuntu install (which I never used). The Vista installation process was fairly smooth, though I must confess that this wasn't the first time I've installed Vista on a machine (Once at my last job I played with the Beta, and one of my coworkers at my current gig got a new machine on which I loaded Vista).
Technically my machine is barely spec for Aero - I have a 1.5 gig of RAM, but only 64 Meg of Video RAM. The perils of a year old laptop. But I guess the 3d accelerator that's part of my ATI video card is picking up a lot of slack - Aero actually runs VERY well on this machine. At least until the machine gets bogged down.
The improvements overall are worthwhile in many regards. This isn't yet a run out and buy it kind of OS, but it will be soon enough. The stability is there. Business (and I assume Ultimate) has a lot of the security features available out of the box that are only available in a server/domain environment. This is a welcome change. One of the really cool features is the way it handles laptops - it can identify what kind of network it's on and adjust security protocols accordingly. The burning functions are good - you can finally burn a DVD directly from the Windows interface. The Start Menu is much better arranged, and while the Cancel/Allow function is easily parodied, it does work.
The drawbacks I've encountered thus far: compatibility, and certain programs running slower on Vista than on XP. Many many programs that worked perfectly on XP - Zone Alarm, Symantec Antivirus Corporate - don't work at all on Vista. And iTunes has some serious issues in the way the program draws the interface (maybe THAT's why it was sucking so much memory...) The new Windows Firewall, while improved, is cumbersome and frankly sucks. But since I can't yet get ZoneAlarm, I'm waiting. Civ 4 and Dark Avatar both run on the system, but as you get further into the game the slower it gets.
So here's where I'm at. If you're buying a new machine for home use - why not? If you're an IT purchaser - hold out if you can, but it's not too difficult to get things working. Just make sure your Symantec license is at least 10.2 and you have a network firewall solution that doesn't require internal software firewalls. If you're upgrading - wait. There will be plenty of reasons to go up to Vista soon enough, and I do like the OS. But there is yet to be a compelling reason until the performance and compatibility issues are resolved.
Posted by MikeSager at March 5, 2007 10:00 PM
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