| Windows Vista: First Impressions |
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| Written by Richard Thompson, Thursday, 22 February 2007 | |
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Windows Vista, will it be Microsofts Next flagship operating system or will it crash and burn in classic style similar to what Windows Millenium? Vista was released last month and in typical Richard style I already had my copy on preorder. I've been running Windows Vista from Beta stage and despite loads of bugs and work around for problems in the beta versions and even in the first release candidate I think Microsoft have done a pretty good job on their final release project. In this article I will talk about my initial experiences in terms of applications which do and which dont work, games i've tested and also just my general opinion about the operating system and in the end will answer my initial question based entirely on my own opinions and not the opinions of the entire Datacrash team. At first glance Windows Vista looks great, the new interface looks incredible and initial performance is also unbelievable. I was expecting poor performance from my notebook because it is by no means a power house machine anymore, but everything just seems to run so quickly. As I said above, my machine is in no way a power house machine. I am running a Intel 1.7 GHz Mobile, 1GB DDR Memory, 100GB 5400rpm Hard Drive and a 128mb ATI Radeon x600 screen card. The Windows Vista installation does take longer to install than previous versions of Windows, but I believe that this is simply because of the size of the operating system. After a clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate you are looking at a Windows directory size of around 7GB. This brings me to my next comment, I would not recommend Windows Vista to anyone with a drive smaller than 40GB. I would say the smallest drive I would install Windows Vista on would be a 60GB drive. My reasoning behind this is Windows alone uses 7-10GB that is already around 25% of your total drive space. If you have a pre-installed machine the hardware vendor most like installed some sort of recovery partition which is most like 1-2GB. Suddenly you realise you haven't installed a single application, bought a single album or anything and you will be sitting at 60% disk utilization and thats without even setting up your page file. Other than hard drive, Windows Vista does use more memory than previous versions of Windows. I've been asked by numerous people how much memory will I need to run Windows Vista and my response is normally how much can your motherboard support? Prices of computer components have been dropping steadily for some time now and memory is no exception. Most top end laptops and desktops are coming out with 1GB as the entry level with a 2GB and sometimes even 3GB upgrade options. At 1GB you will have enough to run Windows Vista and make use of the new Aero Glass interface, assuming you have a reasonable graphics card, and sitll be able to run your various applications without a problem however to be safe 2GB wont be a bad buy! Personally I am running on 1GB and as I mentioned earlier Windows runs perfectly and I am still able to play Battlefield 2! Processor have become something which no one but the top gamers and number crunching geniuses worry about. For home or basic office use an entry level processor will be perfect for Windows Vista. My 1.7GHz m processor sits between 2% and 15% utilization when running an Internet browser, word editor and mail client. So what is all the big fuss about? Basically Microsoft completely re-wrote Windows from the group up with this release. They took what they have learnt from previous versions and worked on it to try and make it better. So whats changed? Firstly when buying the Operating System you will notice that Microsoft went all out with the versions and created Windows Vista Home, Home Premium and Ultimate. Businesses have a further few options on top of this. Could this be the downfall of the operating system? Obviously being an IT geek I want to have all the options in the world and then some so I opted for Ultimate. For a feature matrix of all the editions see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/choose.mspx You will also notice the new Aero Glass interface which ships with Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. It really does look slick. Microsoft also enhanced the Start Bar by including a small thumbnail image of the Window as you hover over it. For me this is more of a gimmick than a great feature because the thumbnail is so small you can't really read anything in the Window anyway! Another nice addition to the old traditional ALT+TAB feature is the Windows Button + TAB Feature. This will do a similar thing to ALT + TAB only it will display 3D windows which display the actual contents of the active window as well as any updates which occur. Other new features include built in Windows Defender, New Windows Update Application, New games, a really handy snipping tool, Shadow copies, Windows Media Player 11, Windows Media Center, Internet Explorer 7, Windows Mail and Windows Photo Gallery. And then I had the privledge of sitting with an Apple MacBook Pro and my Vista notebook side by side. Wow, it looks as though Microsofts developers sat down next to Apple developers for a couple of days and then went and developed their operating system. I compared a simple application, Windows Calendar to the Mac Calendar and even the colours of appoinments, etc are in the same colour! I found that pretty interesting to say the least. One of the biggest complaints about Windows Vista at the moment is the number of applications and games which don't work on the operating system for some or other reason. For me, there is no excuse, blame falls directly on to the application developer for not getting an update or a patch out in time. Everyone has known about Windows Vista for a good 12 - 18 months and the beta release and release candidates were out for months and people should have tested their applications and updated them. So far I know of 2 applications which I use on a daily basis which don't work on Windows Vista, Apple iTunes and Sony Ericsson PC Suite. So far I personally have tested the following applications on Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007, AVG Antivirus, OpenOffice, ATI Caralyst application, Virtual PC 2007, Live Messenger, Treesize Professional and the latest Citrix ICA Client. More applications will be tested over the next few weeks. So to answer my initial question, will this be Microsofts next flagship operating system or will it crash and burn? Quite simply No it will not crash and burn, at the same time I do not think it will get the sales Microsoft were hoping for initially. I think the main reasons for this are the price and the number of versions. At £300 for Ultimate people are going to continue running what they had before and people are confused by the number of choices. As it is people battled to understand the difference between Windows XP Home and Professional how are they supposed to know the differences when there are 6 or 7 choices? Even after all that, I really do like it. If you have any questions regarding this post feel free to ask on the www.datacrash.net forum. Rt |
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