My experience with Vista

[Eldmannen]

Yesterday, I used a computer with Windows Vista (Home Premium), unfortunately only for 10-15 minutes. It had a two widescreen monitors, one 22" and one 24" and 2 gb RAM, and a AMD dual-core CPU. There was also this other computer, with a 30" widescreen monitor, it was sweet.

I've used it for too little time to give a reasonable and fair opinion, but I have got some real first impressions.

On the computer (which was a good computer), Vista ran fast, it was smooth.

The Windows Task Manager has a new tab called "Services". So, they're not anymore in the "Processes" tab. This, I think seemed like a good idea.

The system ran about 50+ processes, but it had some open apps, and I guess you probably could get rid of some processes.

It used about 700+ megabyte RAM, but since Vista uses prefetching, its difficult to make a comparision against the memory consumption of Windows XP.

The User Account Control (UAC) is annoying. It happend very often that it came up and asked me to confirm, but I guess since I was playing around and checking out whats new and stuff, I got more UAC things than someone would get with normal day-to-day activities. The most annoying thing with it, was that before the UAC box came up, the screen would go black for 1-3 seconds, this very very fast got annoying.

I found the user interface to be pretty confusing, at first, I thought "what there are no titlebars?", but then I noticed that its only the "My Computer" thing that don't got a titlebar, all other applications got a titlebar. By the way "My Computer" is re-designed, I thought it was confusing though.

While Windows previously has been very consitent with its user interface, Vista is different, it has changes to the interface. Much of the interface feels less than the Windows interface that I am used to, and I feel that it has been "Macified" or something.

It's possible to change the opacity/transparency of the Aero interface, you change color too. You can also put it to "Windows Classic" theme, so it looks like Windows 2000, which results in less eye-candy, but perhaps cleaner and clearer. When you used the Windows Classic theme, then unfortunately the Windows Sidebar lost its background transparency, I am not sure exactly why this is so, but maybe when you use classic theme, it de-activates hardware-acceleration of the desktop or something.

I don't like the Start Menu (but I didn't like the Start menu in XP either), I think its slow and difficult to use. I like more the classic Start menu in Windows 2000, but luckily you can change Vista to use the classic Start menu.

The Windows Sidebar is a nice addition, it's easy to use, and comes with a couple widgets, such as clock, notes, RSS reader, weather, stock, etc.

One time, I had couple pictures open, and I wanted to change to another, and the whole screen went black, not sure what happend, maybe a bug, or something. But, I did Ctrl+Alt+Del, and Task Manager came up, and I could close Windows Photo Gallery.

One thing that is nice, is that unlike prior versions of Windows, Vista comes with some really nice wallpapers, it was like 10-20 of them I think, all very nice.

I didn't get to experience it, but I like the fact that IE7 in Vista is "protected".

Vista comes with a new chess game, it looked pretty nice.

One thing, I didn't like was in the Control Panel, you used to able to open an control applet, and things would be grouped by tabs, now the tabs are removed, and there are separate control applets for everything. "Display Propeteries" before had Themes, Desktop, Screen Saver, Appearence, Settings, now all those tabs are gone, and you can open "Themes", and it comes up a window, with just one tab, "Themes".

I heard the Windows Firewall was supposed to be improved, this I looked forward to, so I went to look at it, but I couldn't find the ICMP settings, so it kinda felt like it was worse than in XP.

This is my first experience and impressions with Windows Vista, I definitly need more time to evaluate it, play around with it, and discover stuff, and check things out, and use the system. I am not thrilled about Vista, it does not look like I will be switching over to Vista, I think the usability is bad (but, maybe it just takes time to get used to it?).

I do hope that Microsoft releases Windows Sidebar and Windows Photo Gallery to Windows XP, and adds a "Services" tab to the Windows Task Manager in XP, that would be nice. :cake:

[Synapse]

yeap, pretty much sums up my experience with Vista as well.

I especially hate that they "Macified" vista.... I'm using windows because it's windows.. and my experience with it is i'm probably just gonna learn the basics and under the hood stuff, and never get it.. Hopefully Windows Vienna or now known as Windows 7, will be better, if not that'd probably be the only reason i quit Windows for good.

[Eldmannen]

My dad bought a laptop that came with Vista. He didn't like Vista, he thought it was confusing and said he wanted to install Windows XP.

Got to play around with it some.

Vista has new games, the games are not bad, they're good desktop games. All games look much nicer. The game I like the most the chess game, its nice.

It come with this software called "Windows Calendar", and I think to myself "why hasn't this existed in earlier versions of Windows?". I liked it, inserted some entries, but next time I restarted the computer, the Calendar application crashed or something.

The UAC (User Account Control) is really annoying, it annoys me all the time in the control panel. It appears even if you don't want to do any system changes, just check things out. I don't recall screen going black for a second on the laptop though.

I like the network thing, where it displays a simple network diagram like "[computer]------------[router]--------------[internet]" and gives an network overview and marks if there is a problem somewhere. Its good for simple network diagnostics.

WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) and WFP (Windows Filtering Platform) seems interesting. BitLocker seems interesting too.

Some of the old screensavers are jiffied up a bit. I believe the text-to-speech system has been a bit improved, Anna is nicer than Sam.

I heard that the disc burning software defaults to use WinFS which are not readable on other platforms such as Linux, BSD and Mac, instead of keep using the ISO 9660 standard. I don't like that.

[Ultimate Predator]

Which edition do you have?

[Eldmannen]

I don't have any, but my dad has Home Premium on his laptop.

It appears the Disk Quota thing is buggy, because when I clicked on its tab on the "Properties of C:", then I press the button, and it just open a new instance of the window everytime I press the button.

[greenknight]

I don't doubt it was fast, with 2 GB of RAM. Just think how fast XP would be on that machine.

That UAC is annoying seems to be the opinion of almost everyone who tries Vista.

[Tarun]

I've been on Vista for over a month and after a few weeks I really like it. All of these "problems" people say they have, I've not seen a thing about.

[Eldmannen]

I don't doubt it was fast, with 2 GB of RAM. Just think how fast XP would be on that machine.

That UAC is annoying seems to be the opinion of almost everyone who tries Vista.

Yeah, the implementation of UAC was annoying. The idea behind of it was good though.

I've been on Vista for over a month and after a few weeks I really like it. All of these "problems" people say they have, I've not seen a thing about.

Well some of the problems have been fixed with patches and service packs.