New Windows Vista PC

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I’ve finally purchased my ‘Vista’ PC for my home. My new PC was custom built from parts from Fry’s with the help (or should I say completely assembled why I just watched) by Britt from the D2 team (thanks Britt). It’s a smokin’ machine, pretty blue LED lights in front, a bunch of huge drives, 2GB of RAM, ATI 1600 vid card w/512MB of RAM and an AMD 64 bit processor. It’s a great machine and should last me a long time. With Windows Vista and Office 2007 installed it is quite nice. I’m also playing around with Adobe Lightroom Beta 4 which is starting to look like a really good photo processing app for RAW shooters.

The improvements in Windows Vista are vast. With the latest builds I am encountering hardly any issues. It even auto-detected my networked HP 6127 (XP can’t do that!) and although there was no built in driver (boo!), I was easily able to install the XP driver from HPs website and I was on my way. We talk a lot about ‘integrated search’ but a cool place to see this at work (other than the Start menu which is a pretty obvious improvement) is in Control Panel. When you open Control Panel you are presented with a list of icons like ‘System and Maintenance’ and ‘Security’, etc. But, we all know there is a pant-load of settings and configuration options lurking below those 10 icons. If you switch to ‘Classic View’ you can see it gets pretty overwhelming quickly. But – forget classic view, just go up to the ubiquitous ‘Search’ box at the top and type what you are looking for – very quickly that big simple UI transforms itself into a list of all the things in control panel that may pertain to what you typed. Try things like ‘remote’ or ‘password’ or ‘desktop’ and you get a quick list of all things that can be tweeked that relate to what you typed.

But the real validation came from my son, who when he saw Windows Vista in its full-glass-glory for the first time, simply said “super-cool!”. There are a lot of great things in the product, but when people look at it and think “I’ve got to have that” – that is what will really cause Windows Vista to take off.

Andy