My first view of Vista :p
OK, fine, this is not my first view of Vista but the title sounded nice :p I’ve been reading up all that has come out regarding the new features and improvements in Windows Vista and was itching to get my hands on beta 2 when it was announced. Of course, I had to wait till the public beta 2 build was available via the Vista CPP (Customer Preview Program) 🙂
It took about one and a half days to download the 3.2 GB ISO for Vista and then I had to burn a new DVD copy of it. My first few installation attempts (on a two year old Acer Ferrari notebook) failed completely. I then decided to throw caution to the wind (somewhat) and try installing it on my new, Windows Vista Capable certified, Acer Aspire 🙂 Of course, I wasn’t foolish enough to wipe my production machine and install Vista – instead, I wanted to set up the system as a dual-boot machine.
The first snag? When you install Vista via an existing install of Windows, it doesn’t seem to allow you to do any hard disk maintenance (or maybe I missed the option). The space I wanted to utilize was not allocated to a drive and so I had to exit the Vista installer, setup the disk space as a new drive, re-launch the installer and then get going on the installation. About three hours later, I finally was able to dual-boot into Vista 🙂
First impressions? It feels speed? There is none of the application sluggishness that I’ve seen with XP but maybe it’s just early days yet :p I do like some of the customizations and UI tweaks that they’ve done but hate some of the other stuff. (I’ll probably write more on this in another post – either here or elsewhere). I don’t like the fact that some of the familiar power-user options are now hidden away. I like the breadcrumb trail in Explorer (something I loved in IRIX) but don’t like the new explorer overall. It feel kludgy and there aren’t enough customization options. For instance, I don’t believe there is a list view like in XP and I hate having to scroll through screens and screens of details (or big icons) to get to the file I want.
A lot of people say that Vista is not very stable and it should not be run on a production machine. So far, I haven’t had any stability issues at all. I will grant you that it should not be run on a production machine but that’s mostly because quite a bit of your software will not run under it :p So far, I’ve had about 80% success rate with my standard apps. Some refuse to work outright and some have certain UI quirks. But I think I’m going to use Vista more and more in the coming weeks just because it feels so much more smoother for some reason 🙂
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