I downloaded RC1 of Windows Vista over the weekend. I have been hesitant to test it out, but I finally broke down and got it. This is the first release of Windows since I have had a computer that I will not use as my main OS. I don’t count Windows ME in that last statement. I may not want to use XP anymore, but before I became a Mac fan I used it. 2000 was good, NT 4 was stable, but not much hardware would run on it. 98 (all flavors) was slow and crashed, but it was an improvement over 95. 95 was better than windows 3.1, but still wasn’t awesome. The more that I look back the more I realize the pain I went through over the years with these OS’.
I look at Vista in a different light since I look at it not to be my new electronic home, but to see what it is about and see if or when it will have a place at the company I work at. I honestly go into evaluating it, not expecting to like it. I admit I am biased against it based off of everything I have read. My initial assessments reaffirm that fact.
I decided to test it on a physical machine, since I was concerned about the performance of it in a virtual machine. I took a brand new HP desktop that we are deploying and tried to install the Vista DVD. First thing I learned is that our brand new AMD 64bit desktops don’t have DVD drives in the stock configuration. My trusty external drive came in handy. I then learned after 2 attempts that I could not install vista by booting the computer and getting the DVD to load. It started to work, but every time the install UI tried to load the dam computer blue screened. This happened twice until gave up and just loaded the XP build I had on it and just started the install from within windows. I don’t like to do this, and when the process was done I had a windows.old directory. What I would give for a clean install!!!
The install once I finally got it to work, seemed to take forever to run. It honestly took like 2 hours on brand new hardware with 2 gigs of ram. I wasn’t sure about this hardware being fully compatible with Vista since it has an integrated video card on the mother board. Everything did finally install.
Initial performance thoughts are mixed. It didn’t seem faster than XP. The UI did seem sort of cartoonish. It is like they tried for the slick UI that the mac has (and newer linux distributions) but just didn’t get it. They did have some cute UI features like blurring some of the text of items that are visible behind some transparent windows.
The install pains I had alone where not a good start. I didn’t get to do much further testing on it before I went home for the night. I am interested to see how bad IE 7 is. Jayson put a version of IE 7 on an XP box and had only bad things to say about it. I will see if I have time tomorrow to do more testing. I will have a follow up posting with more feedback. For now I can safely say unless Leopard is total crap I will stick with the Mac for now.
Technorati Tags: AMD 64bit, mac, vista ui, vista rc1, windows vista
