When I decided to write a report about Vista, I almost abandoned the idea as so many people were writing the same sort of thing, ranging from the extremely technical to the flamboyant and surreal, with all sorts of articles in between, some of which I could identify with very well.
As an aside, the second link seems to have attracted a deluge of reaction, some of which I'm not sure is warranted. The guy probably just wrote his article in a few spare moments and now finds himself at the centre of flame war - people take things too seriously!
Anyway, I installed Vista on one PC as a dual boot option when the business release came out. That's still working fine, but it isn't going to be the main operating system on that particular PC for some time. Same with the laptop - I installed my copy of Home Premium on it, expecting to have my free upgrade before the 30 days expired. That hasn't happened of course, and hundreds of people like me are still waiting for these upgrades from Moduslink.
So my dual core Athlon 64 3800+, with 2 GB RAM, an ATI XL1300 series graphics card and two SATA hard drives totalling 320 GB had an OEM copy of Home Premium installed, first of all alongside XP. It was immediately apparent that the most pressing problem was the lack of hardware support, as printers, scanners, USB keys, bluetooth, all showed flakey responses to supposedly inbuilt support or newly released "vista" drivers. None of my 4 USB keys initially worked until an update from Microsoft had been installed - it seemed unbelievable that within the 15 GB installed on your hard drive there was no support for USB keys! The printers seemed to please themselves - at one time all 3 computers had both printers working correctly, but this eventually dwindled to just my PC recognising both printers. My ancient scanners worked without a problem - the Mustek with the original drivers! The combination of Nokia software and this particular bluetooth dongle gave intermittent success at the best of times in XP and I've totally given up on it in Vista. It would install the drivers fine and recognise the phone, but each reboot it would need to go through the whole performance again - and the Nokia software needed a reboot to finalise the install. Even my Microsoft mouse had problems! It will only work in one USB port on the laptop and on the Ultimate install on the other desktop, the only way to proceed after booting up is to cancel 3 messages about newly found hardware. Attempting to do any thing else causes the entire system to hang.
However, the printers were working on the computer I wanted to run Vista on as the main operating system, all my USB keys were eventually recognised with one set up nicely to use the new ReadyBoost function, I had a working scanner and photos could be copied from my phone on another computer, by cable or by taking out the memory card. But various problems of one sort of another led to so many reinstalls of Vista that it must have triggered something at Microsoft, because my copy refused to activate and I had to phone them up! I became very glad I installed Acronis, and eventually just decided to have the one operating system on here, Vista.
I have to say that after using it for a few days, I forget that it isn't something I've been using for months, if not years. I don't feel there's all that much difference between Vista and XP once you've got used to a few changes. The 3D Aero interface is nice, and there are plenty of small improvements. To resize desktop icons for instance, used to be a registry hack - now it's just a case of clicking on one, holding down the ctrl button and scrolling with the mouse. I used to have to put a shortcut on the desktop for users to lock the PC, now there's a button in the Start menu. Printscreens are saved by default in Paint as jpegs rather than bmps and Sleep is quite useful - I now save more power by nearly always putting my PC to sleep at night, knowing that with the aid of ReadyBoost it will quickly be connected to exactly where I left off the night before, within about 30 seconds.
These improvements were balanced out by the irritations however. I quickly turned off UAC and found it annoying to be told that I didn't have "permission" to view my own pictures, especially when by another route, the same folder could be accessed without a problem. Getting access to these denied folders is by a tortuous route which involves first of all taking ownership of them and working through resetting NTFS file permissions - it was just irritating to have to do this for every denied folder, especially when I was working with an administrator account. Turning off UAC means that IE doesn't run in protected mode either - not that this matters too much as I use Firefox as the default browser. The rating system was another frustration - this computer was given an insulting 2.8! Given that my laptop scored 2.3 and my second desktop was given 3.3, it seemed a bit skewed. This is because it returns a score based on the lowest rated component, and in this case, my graphics card pulled the rest of the configuration down. I'm not a gamer and slightly resented having to buy a new 3D graphics card just for the operating system, but I wasn't going to buy anything more than I needed. The laptop was lucky - it was manufactured just in time to take advantage of Intel's new GMA 950 chip which meant the onboard graphics could utilise Aero. My SFF (the spare desktop) hasn't got a fantastic graphics card but it's better than my ATI one here (even though it has half the RAM) and that meant that the lower spec PC was actually rated by Vista 5 points higher.
This same PC running Vista Ultimate has Windows Mail set up, but generally I still prefer Thunderbird. In fact, just about all of my old programs run happily in Vista and I've only had to find new versions for programs like Aconis.
To sum up, I'm pretty happy with the way Vista is running right now, but I'm also pretty happy with XP on my laptop for a bit longer if necessary, and as the main OS on the second desktop computer. I could have saved a lot of the problems myself, by not trying to dual boot Vista with Kubuntu and by installing it on the right hard drive in the first place. Touch wood, after a rather shakey start, everything seems to have settled down quite quickly and it's been a fairly smooth transition.
28th February 2007