The first obvious point is its quite pretty as far as a Windows OS goes, and once you get most of the grubby things turned off and classic views up, it actually looks a lot nicer and is much easier on the eye that the "My First Operating System" that was XPs interface. I still use Classic View in XP to this day, but I can see me leaving Vista View on and actually missing it when I have to boot into XP.
My 4 year old laptop has no issues with its hardware either. Old XP driver worked for the SigmaTel soundcard and the Agere modem which weren't installed by Vista, but even the Mobility Radeon 9000 drivers were installed and working correctly.. something XP didn't even do.
The install wasn't without its hiccups however. I recently lost one of my RAM modules to Corruption and have been running the laptop with one 256mb DDR module. After installing my Corporate version of XP from my offices Action Pack, I grabbed the Vista upgrade DVD and stuck it in. It wouldn't even consider my machine as it had less than 512mb of RAM. This pissed me off given one of the better features Vista can do is to use a pen drive as a cheap alternative to RAM/accessing a slower HDD. Microsoft want people to upgrade their RAM as well as buy XP "Service Pack 3" apparently...
I mean what a fucking stupid test in the first place. My laptop has a 2.8Ghz processor and a Radeon 9000 graphics cards, which even by todays standards is a pretty good spec for a laptop. Its a bit short on memory because of the fault, but why should the base install of an Operating System give a shit that I don't have 512mb of RAM? I'm the one who chooses to run the programs in its environment and I'm happy for them to run from the page file albeit
The install took forever... almost 2 hours. If we have to continue forward with Vista in the future for clients, the first machine install before creating an image to build with is going to be like pulling teeth. Its not even interesting nor does it relay helpful information to let you know whats going on. There were two occasions I actually thought the machine had crashed, only for it to jump back to life again moments later to the screen it was previously on.
Another thing is its fucking huge... like 7 gigabytes huge. I can accept a good Linux distribution like Fedora Core being around the 4 or 5 gigabyte install range knowing that practically every application I will ever need are installed from the get go, including OpenOffice, programming suites, photo editing tools, movie and music players, games, hell.. even a 3D modelling package or two, but seriously... Vistas install is around the 6 gigabyte mark and is just an Operating System shell - it even commented on the partition I was using wasn't big enough - it recommended I used another partition as my 8000mb partition was 500mb too small for optimal performance, but unlike the start of the install, it didn't throw its rattle out of the pram and allowed me to continue.
Some people might turn around and say "big whoop, I have nearly a terabyte of HD space, 6 gig is nothing" but when a clean install really doesn't have that much in the way of extra software, it makes me paranoid about all the extra crap thats buried deep in this Titanic. I remember thinking that 200mb for Windows 98 was a bit big and was forever finding ways to get rid of unneeded files back in the day. Granted that PC only had a 2GB hard drive, but still.... 6 gigabytes is taking the piss...
We'll see how Vista goes with it for a little while... I haven't tried to do anything interesting with it yet, like run a DivX movie, MP3s I may or may not legitimately have acquired or come across any of the other DRM demons I know they've built into it... but I'm sure I will, and when I do I'll be straight back to dual booting!
1 comment:
gotta say... my favourite part of the article was the tag "what a large operating system you have".... hilarious.
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