Vista Initial thoughts

I got a new laptop for work last week and elected to order it with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. I had been dragging my feet about moving to Vista on any of my computers because I really didn't see any benefit other than aesthetics, but my company wanted a few of us try out the new OS.

So far, I've been using Vista for about a week and figured I'd share my initial thoughts and impressions since the people that read this blog are usually the ones that ask me about computers / technical stuff.

Memory requirements:

I ordered my new computer with only 1 GB of RAM and then bought a 2 GB module from crucial.com. I wanted to get all of the initial system updates applied and the antivirus software installed prior to opening up the case and installing the additional RAM, so I was using Vista Ultimate for about 2 hours with just 1 GB of RAM. I would liken the experience to running Windows XP with only 256 MB of RAM and wouldn't recommend it to anybody. After popping in the additional memory, the system runs MUCH better.

Graphics / Interface:

The new Aero features are pretty slick, and I do enjoy using the 3D task switcher (Win+Tab) much better than the old-style task switcher (Alt+Tab). However, other than that, I don't see a whole lot of benefit over XP.

I do like that the desktop icons seem to now be vector images instead of rasterized, which, you may recall, means that you can make the icons larger without sacrificing quality.

One interesting (Ultimate only) feature of Vista that I've tried out is DreamScene. Apparently people weren't happy with just having an image as their desktop background so Microsoft decided to let users set a MPEG move file as their desktop wallpaper. I'm guessing that Microsoft kept this as a Vista Ultimate-only feature because they assume that if a user ponies up the extra $$ for Ultimate, they'll be using a system with high-end hardware that won't mind giving some resources to DreamScene. In my completely un-scientific testing, I found that DreamScene increased CPU load by around 5% compared to just using a solid-colored image as the desktop wallpaper. I can't imagine very many people using an animated background other than the subtly animated Vista background because it just gets to distracting.

Program Compatibility:

Because this is my work laptop, I haven't put too many non-Microsoft applications on it. However, I did load it up with open-source apps, and so far have found that most of the apps that I use work fine in Vista. Pidgin, Audacity, GIMP, VLC Player, and Firefox all work great. I did have one quirk with Firefox that popped up error messages until I ran Firefox using the "Run as Administrator" option. After doing that once, now Firefox runs without error even without running with the elevated security.

Hardware / Device Compatibility:

I was easily able to connect my Motorola Q and browse it the Explorer. I was also able to install the Motorola drivers that would allow me to charge the Q via USB. However, when I tried to sync the Q with Outlook, I hit a wall. First of all, Microsoft has replaced the old ActiveSync that we're all used to with a new application called Windows Mobile Device Center. This came pre-installed on my machine, so I was surprised when my computer refused to establish a partnership with my Q. I finally got it working by downloading the most recent version of WMDC and now it works great. It baffles me that the version of WMDC that was pre-installed wouldn't work for me, though: my Q is running Windows Mobile 5...an operating system that's been around since 2005.

Security Prompts:

One of the major gripes that people have with Vista is the frequency of the security prompts that are designed to make sure that your computer doesn't get infected by all of the nasties out there on the internet. I agree that these alerts are extremely annoying, however, it does point out how frequently you're modifying Windows files. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to disable the prompts, or just learn to deal with them, but I usually don't find them as intrusive as I'd expected.
What really bugs me so far is that a security dialog will sometimes open but not come to the forefront like normal. So I'll be waiting for a program to install or a setting to change and nothing will happen. Then I'll look at my taskbar to see that there is an alert there waiting for me. When I click on the alert then the screen will go dark like usual and I can approve the action.
For a home user who would not consider themselves a power user, I can definately understand how these alerts are helpful. However, for somone like me who is constantly tinkering with settings and protected files, they really become a hassle.

Misc. Notes:

I have encountered a problem with the "Safely remove device" feature that is used to make sure that all I/O is stopped before ejecting a hard drive/flash drive/camera/etc. In Windows XP, as long as nothing is accessing a device, you could eject it. In Vista, however, I have found that even with no programs running, it will not let me "safely" eject my external hard drive. I have requested a hotfix from Microsoft that purports to fix this issue, but I haven't tried it yet.

This was more of an issue with Microsoft Office, however, I'll list it here because it may have been Vista-related. My laptop came pre-installed with a 30-day trial of Office 2007. One of the first programs that I installed was a licensed version of Office Ultimate 2007. I was a bit annoyed to find that even after installing this licensed version, all of my office applications put the phrase "non-commercial use" in the titlebar. After researching if there was a way to remove this from the titlebar, I finally resigned to completely un-installing both the Office 2007 Trial and the Office Ultimate 2007 installations and then re-installing Office Ultimate 2007 in order to get rid of the "non-commercial use" message. What a pain!