Personal Bytes

Introduction

My University received the MSDN Academic License meaning that there were free copies of Windows Vista available to students and teachers. I really wanted to give it a spin — it’s not honest to rant about something you haven’t tried yourself and since I’d never give a single cent for it this was the big chance.

The test machine is a little bit old but it was a nice opportunity to see how Vista performs on such an old configuration — considering that it’s still quite usable. AMD Athlon 1.4 Ghz, 640MB RAM and a GeForce DDR ought to be enough to run Ubuntu and Windows XP. At least, my sister never complained for doing her day-to-day tasks (IM, browser, mail, office stuff, etc..). Although Windows XP was rarely used, I do remember it ran quite fine.

Installation

I can’t complain about the installation. Everything went as it was supposed to. Installation did not took ages and it was definitely more compelling to watch than Windows XP (and to be fair, to the majority of Linux distros). But the installation process does not make an operating system…

Immediate afterwards

Now the bad part. Hardware detection. If people complain about Linux they should definitely take a close look at Windows Vista. My sound (Creative Live! bulk), ethernet (old Compaq) and wireless (Conceptronic C22) cards were not detected.

For an operating system that takes up to 6GB upon install they could have reserved some extra megabytes of space for including legacy drivers. I had to go to each manufacturer website and download a copy of Windows 2000 or Windows XP drivers. The installation of these drivers was not trivial too — I had to manually extract some cab files and then manually associate the hardware with the .sys file.

Using Vista

Is it usable? Well, it is. It’s way slower than Windows XP or any of the Linux distros I use but it can be used. Unfortunately, it takes up to 380MB of RAM after a cold reboot. Windows XP takes ~ 190MB RAM. Considering that the PC is not that full of RAM I think it’s something noteworthy.

All the bells and whistles are turned off since I got a result of 1 out of 5 according to Windows advisor. The GUI feels sluggish but as I’ve said before, it is usable. At least when you don’t open more than one application at once…

Annoyances

There were a couple of annoyances. First, Windows Media Center crashed my machine immediately after I opened it. Thanks. Secondly, Vista lacks a PDF viewer. I’d say that’s one of the most rudimentary and trivial applications an OS should include. No one should have to go to a website and download an application to open a PDF file. Thirdly, I was not able to install the Flash extension on Firefox 2.0.0.1. I still have to figure out if it’s Firefox or Vista fault (funny thing that IE7 uses more memory than Firefox on the very same situation).

Also, Paint was showing a quite awkward bug while simply trying to save a screenshot.

Oh, and of course, UAC. It’s one of the most annoying things I’ve ever seen. This by itself would be a nice reason to dump Vista.

 

I’d certainly find a lot more annoyances if I used Vista for more than two weeks but time is scarce.

Final conclusions

This is far from being a thorough review of Windows Vista. The title may be misleading due to the single fact that it’s strictly appealing to be funny, not conclusive. Still, I’d like to draw my own conclusions based on what all I’ve read and, now, experimented.

There are some functionalities in Vista that are actually worth — search and DirectX 10. If you’re a gamer and will be playing DX 10 games than you have no other option other than installing Vista. Considering that a gamer has the ultimate machine available on the market it will certainly run Vista quite well.

On the other hand, if you’re a mere mortal that only does normal tasks than there’s nothing to see here. You won’t get nothing new that you were really needing. Vista is still insecure and has virus (to which extent yet to be unveiled), you won’t notice the new network stack (apart from the fact that now the task of configuring networks is a pain in the ass) nor you’ll miss the eye candy. You’ll like the indexed search though.

If you’re feeling good with Windows XP, then keep it. Avoid trouble. If you want to try a new operating system, then maybe it’s time to pass the token to Linux or Mac OS X.

Disclosure

As most of the readers know, I’m not that very fond to Microsoft. I do recognize however that they have good products, like its Visual Studio suite or even Microsoft Office.

Windows Vista is definitely not one of them.

Flickr set of Windows Vista screenshots