snowpics

Well, I bit the biscuit and vistified myself. I just completed the install of Microsoft’s new Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate. Let me say the installation was painless and smooth with no hiccups or driver issues so far. So far I have not yet installed all of my applications so it will be interesting to see what prevails during these installations. The biggest items I am worried about are the applications I use for photo editing. First one is Capture One Pro. and Adobe Light room and of course Photoshop. I of course left myself a new partition when I built my new machine so I can dual boot into and out of XP in case of any incompatibilities.

My first impressions of Vista are mediocre. Of course there are aloy of new things to learn and some I had learned in MAC OS X. The look and feel of the installation cried OS/x to me. There was no fussing around telling it to create partitions, and all of the Windows NT / 2000 / 2003 installation look and fell of blue ascii text is gone. My first time into the installation was slightly concerning as the first screen which I imagine was loading initial driver files and figuring out my system left me with no progress indication or information for at least 10 minutes. I felt as though my system was locked as there was no disk activity, but I allowed it to continue.

The installation continued fairly quickly leaving my system unscathed and my XP OS intact. The total install time took about 1.5 Hours on my 3.4Ghz Dual Core with 2 GB Ram. I was expecting much longer. Once into Vista the O/S responds nicely on my machine but boot times are slightly increased over Windows XP. This is of course expected. Vista has something call ‘Windows Experience Index’ a way to judge one’s computer’s performance and compare with other machines. So far my computer scored a 4.1 – not sure really where I stand, but over all pretty fair I think. This allows Vista to automatically scale your environment to suit the performance of your computer.

Windows Vista also has fairly nice ‘Look and Feel’ about it. Very similar in a lot of ways to MAC OS/X. Mostly because they scooped up the widgets as they are called in os-x and renamed them as gadgets. These are simply small applications that give you information in a sidebar. For example I have my clock, a slide show, and a RSS feed monitor. I also added a CPU performance monitor for curiosity. The taskbar hasn’t adopted the ‘dock’ feel from OSx yet, but I am sure that is next. The start button has been replaced by the ‘Vista’ button I guess and the feel of the ‘All Programs’ is very clunky and difficult to navigate. I am sure there are some options buried in there that have yet to be discovered that can help me adapt to the new way Microsoft wants us to work.

I guess for now that is enough to digest on Vista for now. I will post more later as I discover more of this new system.