The Geek Mythologies

Vista Kicks Ass

I downloaded the Windows Vista RC1 last week. RC1 means it’s a Release Candidate, which is a freebie pre-release version that Mircosoft has released so users can give them feedback to iron out bugs before its official release in 2007. I have to say that – thus far – its doing more kicking of ass than sucking of it! It’s not been often that I’ve raved about a release of Windows before… While XP had some nice elements, I certainly wouldn’t have rushed out to buy it. With Vista, I just might!

Pros

Most of the stuff I really like about it is purely cosmetic… like the general look and feel of the desktop with its swanky overuse of transparencies and cool side bar thingee. The windows all maximise and minimise in wicked little animations – going trapezoidal to make it look like they’re tilting back or forth as they resize, not just shrinking. (Click to enlarge the image)

My other fave “pretty bit” is the folders view, spedifically the way the thumbnails view works. A whole lot cuter than XP.

Cons

I woudln’t say I’ve found too many so far, althought I would have to say don’t bother with it unless you’ve got 1GB of RAM. Apparently it will run on 512MB, but my sidebar is telling me that it’s constantly using 44%-48% of my RAM just idling (LUNA still has 1GB). My only other minor beef is that some of my hardware doesn’t yet run on it properly as there are some XP drivers that simply wont install and the manufacturers have yet to develop Vista drivers. That’s all good by me though, as my major issue is my soundcard and I have onboard AC97 sound anyways. Apparently Creative do have drivers, I just haven’t had a chance to test them yet, and my OEM driver disk just doesn’t work.

I haven’t been able to test the Media Center functions as I can’t get my TV Tuner card to work yet either, but that to me is a minor. In the long run I’d quite like to get a Vista system running to work as an Entertainment center at home though.

The old menu bars seem to be hidden by default too, which was a bit frustrating for starters, but I discovered as soon as you hit ALT they appear – after trying with my mouse for a good 10 minutes!! This makes applications look heaps tidier which is cool, and just one of those things to get used to I guess.

The Start menu seems difficult to use to me. Instead of popping out sub menus, it seems to populate a single menu with the submenu with a “back” or “up” button to return to the previous menu. You can flick that over to “Classic” version though so I might just do that instead. Also the shutdown options seem to be harder to get to, whereas the sleep and hibernate modes seem easier. They’ve set the whole OS up to be running constantly I think. Would be good to see some sort of “personalising” options for this so shut down could be the preferred method of halting (as I’m always on the go with my box) – they may actually be there, but I have yet to find them.

Summary

Anyways. Big double thumbs up to MS. This complete overhaul of Windows seems awesome so far and not so completely different to XP that its foreign. It’s pretty, it’s pretty quick and for the most part really stable.

Oh by the way… Connor is doing really well… mid week last week he was 10lbs 6oz so had put on a whole pound in just over a week. He missed his weigh in this week by snoozing!

See other posts by Bren