I've finally joined the in crowd and upgraded my home PC to Vista. I
acquired a free copy of Vista Ultimate from via my work provided MSDN
subscription and so I could not discern any reason to not try it out.
So far my experience has been pretty positive, since upgrading was
easier than I fear it would be. Even though the install claimed it
would be fresh it still kept all of my old files, placing them into a
Window.old folder and even left the folders I'd place in the root
alone. I had spent all of my evening on Friday backing up files for
naught as they were still around when vista booted itself into
existence.
The Good
- I really am enjoying the Aero Interface; it certainly an improvement of the drab practicality of XP.
I really like the added transparency to the widow headings and borders,
it's beyond cool. I used to have a graphics card on my previous Desktop
that would make windows transparent when you dragged them around, but
it couldn't do window parts. The new round start button is easier on
the eyes and takes up less room on the taskbar. Vista's Gadgets, a
bunch of small apps that hang out on the right side of the screen, is a
nifty idea although so far I only display the weather gadget and
occasionally the CPU gauge. Still, I can the see the potential of
getting some gadgets (such as a server weather warning that pops up if
theirs a tornado near-by), but I have feeling it'll probably end up
being useless like most of the IE Add-ons.
- The upgrading experience was simple a few simple options and it
good to go. Sadly I went apartment hunting while it was installing so I
have no idea how long it actually took to install, but I must have been
less than three hours.
- Now I can finally use 64 bit programs since my previous incarnation
of windows was only 32 bit even though I have a 64 bit Athalon
processor.
The bad
- My Lame Lexmark printer doesn't work with vista although it was
barely working beforehand, so I'm not particularly sad to see it fly
into the dumpster.
- The Sound will skip or crackle occasionally. I've tried different
players and so far Windows Media player is working tolerably well,
although even it is subject to skipping. I'm also not particularly
found of it's playlist options... It seem other players tend to be
worse with the crackling with Winamp being almost unlistenable. I'm not
sure if it's my poorly written audio driver or something intrinsic in
Vista, perhaps it'll be fixed in a future update.
- I need to
add another 1GB of Ram in order to properly run more than one program,
but that was something I probably should have done beforehand.