Coming around to Vista

  • Article

I'm finally a believer.

See, a few months ago, before I went on my Russia trip, I decided to install Windows Vista Beta 2.  I was an early Win2K user and was able to use it (at home even) from Beta 1 on.  Ditto with XP.  Since I was giving a keynote I thought it would be nice for me to show off some of the great new look and feel features of Vista like Aero Glass, etc.

A few days before I left, I pushed a clean install of Vista onto my laptop, a Toshiba M5.  Install was rough.  For some reasons the hardware laptops is nothing like that on desktops.  Even with XP, it's not unusual to have to go dig up drivers for networking adapters, Bluetooth, etc.  So for Vista, I had to install a bunch of alpha drivers, and even a pre-release BIOS.  Yikes.  So I got it all up and running, and it basically worked.  Well, I was in for trouble.  The whole experience was not good.  Besides random things not working it was sloooooooow..  Did I mention it was slow?  It seemed to be having issues with my hard driive.  Any on-disk work was slow.  Unzipping a 5M ZIP file on the desktop could take minutes.  Plus the sound card would stop working on a regular basis (at best) or decide to loop with a really annoying "teeeek-teeek-teeek-teeeek" sound.  

I tried to drink the Koolaid but it gave me hives.  So I went back to XP and Office 2003 (note my experience at the time with Office 2007 was considerably better than Vista, but I just went back on everything).

Last week, the execs start sending "Please Install Vista - You'll Like It!" emails.  My guilt got to me - I mean, I do work here, right?  Plus some folks said it had improved considerably.

So I took the plunge.  More than that I decided to do the real edgy thing and upgrade my XP install (insert scary music here). 

I had a heck of a scare during the install.  The video stopped working.  Kaput.  But the hard drive was still spinning so I let it go, and after a while I rebooted it.  Twice.  Lo-and-behold, it came back and finished the install without trouble.  Phew.

Since then, I'm glad to report, I've almost completely forgotten my orginal experience.  Some thoughts:

  • It's way faster.  It seems faster than XP actually.  My computer sits and spins for no-good-reason much less frequency.
  • I like Aero Glass.  It looks nice, works well, and after some adjustment, generally makes sense to me.
  • They've greatly improved the LUA (Local User Adminstrator) security stuff.  On Beta 2 I turned it off because it bugged the heck out of me.  Now I actually like it.  It's much less "prompty" and I like the idea that I'll get warned if some software tries to pull a fast one.  Security is cool.
  • My machine is running the Vista "Ultimate" SKU with the built in Media Center.  It is super-freakin-cool.  I had my laptop at home over the weekend when my XBOX 360 was on.  I get a prompt that says "Windows has detected a Media Center Extender on this network.  Would you like to set it up now?"  Cool.  Very cool.  As soon as I can get a MCE PC with a CableCard, I'm all over that.  Goodbye cable boxes.  Hello one-media-server-for-my-whole-house.  It just makes me happy thinking about it.
  • Mobile Device Bluetooth support!  Finally, I don't have to trick it into thinking it's using a COM port!
  • Most of my programs "just worked".  The only exception were programs (in this case Visual Studio/TFS Source Control mappings) that had saved the old "c:\documents and settings\sburke" path somewhere.  I had to go manually update those to point to "c:\users".  Once I figured that out, all was good.
  • Search, especially in the start menu.  Very nice.  No more walking through a gazillion levels of menus to find minesweeper.

I'm sure there's a ton of other stuff that I don't use and/or haven't discovered yet.  In any case, I'm glad to see the product coming around!