I got vista business a few days before launch and was excited to have it. I knew from the start not to install over xp so I got partition magic and made a new partition. Installation went fine, no problems there, it was actually kinda quick. When I saw the desktop and the new look I was pretty excited and couldn't wait to fool around with everything. Here are my thoughts on what I have done thus far.
IE: IE is basically the latest version of firefox with the ability to load a mini image of all pages in one window with some missing options. I noticed that there seems to be more protections but thats about it. Nothing really special to make you wanna switch if you have a browser you like already. Firefox has some extra options that make it a bit more convenient.
Games: I didn't really give the games dept. a full run because I didn't want to spend time installing all the apps. I did however run into my xp partition and load up Max Payne 2. I noticed that everything seemed to work fine, the frames weren't bogged down and it loaded. Everything was fine except sound and subtitles. After a few minutes the sound just cuts and won't come back until I turn the game back on. Everytime the same thing happens, sounds works for 3 mins then cuts off. Other than that, its fine. I also checked out the games explorer and the default games that come with windows like minesweeper and solitaire. Games explorer is just an explorer window that list in different views games that you have played with little details like the kind you would find under a mp3 file, such as publisher, version, year and so on. You can also add games as it appears that games explorer doesn't always automatically grab your games for you. Next I checked out the default games. There are a few new editions to the list but nothing great. New is purples place, a title for kids, made up of simple mini games. Next is a game where you have multiple balls on the screen and you use your mouse to draw walls to deflect the balls into holes. It was fun for awhile and a bit challenging. Then there is titan chess. What can I say its chess, its 3d and its titanic. There you have it. Since I suck at chess it was just a matter of time since the cpu beat my ass on normal without losing any vital pieces. After this brief venture I truly believe that it will be useless to game inside of vista for the first six months of its release as no dx10 games will be available during that time.
Look and Feel: Like I said before it was nice to do things in vista. It had a new look and feel, it had a aero theme just to make you feel special and you do for the first few hours.
Some common file types have new looks and by default all the icons on the desktop are bigger. More view types are added into explorer but again, nothing really special to make you want to use those new view types. The highly talked about sidebar throws up a few items without you asking it to and by default it put a feeder reader, a clock and a gallery of pictures that I have never seen before. I found the clock useless since I have one in the taskbar and for the life of me I could not configure the feed reader. It has options but you can't choose what feeds you actually want. You can only add or remove the preselected microsoft feeds. Something annoying yet deletable is how everytime you do anything basically other than surf the net and shut down you are asked for permission to continue. I didn't mind it though because you simply have to click yes or no to continue with your action. The start bar has been revamped as well. No longer does your programs list cascade into a list that takes half the screen, it just loads right into start panel. Imagine in xp where your recently used programs were. If you click on all programs, the list simply opens in the that area and works well with small font and more scrolling. The control panel has a lot options listed and a lot of the new items just appear to be things from vista that were just hard to find. For instance there is now a icon that plugs you right into the file type configuration so you can choose how to open certain file types instead of the method of going thru the explorer options in xp. All the shine and glitter of the new look and feel will not keep you very long.
Issues: I just wrote a little essay about one problem regarding sound that can be found here :http://www.hardwareforums.com/vista-turned-off-my-music-sounds-then-plays
-shutdown-theme-when-i-turn-off-17089/
In case you don't want to read it, I basically go into to detail about how vista cut off my music while I was listening to something I downloaded a long time ago. Another issue that I'm having is that the sound from my tv tuner refuses to work. It will work for 5 minutes or so then nothing. Now when I turn it on, I get no sound at all. I'm not sure what the issue is and haven't researched it yet so I can't say for sure although I have heard that a lot of hardware will not work with vista. The software issue besides the one in my other write up is that alcohol 120 no longer works. I have a older version and it just didn't make the cut.
Overall: I have had vista for almost a month and have used it for half a week. Why? cause right now xp is just better. My games work, my tv works and I have no issues with software. I have not used vista in some time, that would in part explain why this writeup is not so thorough. I just couldn't remember everything. The shine and glitter of vista corroded away withing hours of getting it. I got it friday afternoon and was 90% done with vista friday night. I'm not lying. I'm not saying that vista completely sucks but at this rate I may only use it for dx10 games. I also noticed that vista takes really long to shut down and when I say really long I mean it. I have a 3.4 ghz p4 ee with 2 gigs ram and it takes between 6-10 minutes to shut down ( estimate from the few times I have shut down). It takes so long to shut down that you will think your comp froze and will end up doing a hard shut down. Also vista froze up on one of the first times I started it. Another thing that makes me quite uncomfortable is vista is always connected to the net. I know it sounds a little crazy cause with internet nowadays pc's are always connected but I honestly feel like vista may be monitoring some activity and when my music cutoff and went dead I knew something was up. In my honest opinion I feel that vista did not come from the demands of the user but the wants of the music and movie industries. Vista is nothing more than a DRM tool. I was enticed by the pretty pictures and nice colors but all in all Vista is a visual upgrade. Thats why I was done with it in one day. You get it, install it, see its pretty and thats it. If you look at the state of things with music and movies you will realize that vista exist to get a tighter control on multimedia with DRM. There is no apparent need to switch to vista. Microsoft made reasons like security and dx10 but thats just how desperate they are. XP could have had dx10 and if it did, I doubt any gamer would touch vista. Just about every analyst sees that no one will update to vista immediately and the only way MS will spread the vista seed is by packaging it with new pc's. I think that right now vista is not a necessity but in about 5-10 years when xp gets old and people can't hack it you will see that either MS will have won or some other company will step up and start taking shares from MS. For the time being save your money and buy something useful. Vista won't be useful for another year or so for most and even then who knows what tricks MS will have up their sleeve.
IE: IE is basically the latest version of firefox with the ability to load a mini image of all pages in one window with some missing options. I noticed that there seems to be more protections but thats about it. Nothing really special to make you wanna switch if you have a browser you like already. Firefox has some extra options that make it a bit more convenient.
Games: I didn't really give the games dept. a full run because I didn't want to spend time installing all the apps. I did however run into my xp partition and load up Max Payne 2. I noticed that everything seemed to work fine, the frames weren't bogged down and it loaded. Everything was fine except sound and subtitles. After a few minutes the sound just cuts and won't come back until I turn the game back on. Everytime the same thing happens, sounds works for 3 mins then cuts off. Other than that, its fine. I also checked out the games explorer and the default games that come with windows like minesweeper and solitaire. Games explorer is just an explorer window that list in different views games that you have played with little details like the kind you would find under a mp3 file, such as publisher, version, year and so on. You can also add games as it appears that games explorer doesn't always automatically grab your games for you. Next I checked out the default games. There are a few new editions to the list but nothing great. New is purples place, a title for kids, made up of simple mini games. Next is a game where you have multiple balls on the screen and you use your mouse to draw walls to deflect the balls into holes. It was fun for awhile and a bit challenging. Then there is titan chess. What can I say its chess, its 3d and its titanic. There you have it. Since I suck at chess it was just a matter of time since the cpu beat my ass on normal without losing any vital pieces. After this brief venture I truly believe that it will be useless to game inside of vista for the first six months of its release as no dx10 games will be available during that time.
Look and Feel: Like I said before it was nice to do things in vista. It had a new look and feel, it had a aero theme just to make you feel special and you do for the first few hours.
Some common file types have new looks and by default all the icons on the desktop are bigger. More view types are added into explorer but again, nothing really special to make you want to use those new view types. The highly talked about sidebar throws up a few items without you asking it to and by default it put a feeder reader, a clock and a gallery of pictures that I have never seen before. I found the clock useless since I have one in the taskbar and for the life of me I could not configure the feed reader. It has options but you can't choose what feeds you actually want. You can only add or remove the preselected microsoft feeds. Something annoying yet deletable is how everytime you do anything basically other than surf the net and shut down you are asked for permission to continue. I didn't mind it though because you simply have to click yes or no to continue with your action. The start bar has been revamped as well. No longer does your programs list cascade into a list that takes half the screen, it just loads right into start panel. Imagine in xp where your recently used programs were. If you click on all programs, the list simply opens in the that area and works well with small font and more scrolling. The control panel has a lot options listed and a lot of the new items just appear to be things from vista that were just hard to find. For instance there is now a icon that plugs you right into the file type configuration so you can choose how to open certain file types instead of the method of going thru the explorer options in xp. All the shine and glitter of the new look and feel will not keep you very long.
Issues: I just wrote a little essay about one problem regarding sound that can be found here :http://www.hardwareforums.com/vista-turned-off-my-music-sounds-then-plays
-shutdown-theme-when-i-turn-off-17089/
In case you don't want to read it, I basically go into to detail about how vista cut off my music while I was listening to something I downloaded a long time ago. Another issue that I'm having is that the sound from my tv tuner refuses to work. It will work for 5 minutes or so then nothing. Now when I turn it on, I get no sound at all. I'm not sure what the issue is and haven't researched it yet so I can't say for sure although I have heard that a lot of hardware will not work with vista. The software issue besides the one in my other write up is that alcohol 120 no longer works. I have a older version and it just didn't make the cut.
Overall: I have had vista for almost a month and have used it for half a week. Why? cause right now xp is just better. My games work, my tv works and I have no issues with software. I have not used vista in some time, that would in part explain why this writeup is not so thorough. I just couldn't remember everything. The shine and glitter of vista corroded away withing hours of getting it. I got it friday afternoon and was 90% done with vista friday night. I'm not lying. I'm not saying that vista completely sucks but at this rate I may only use it for dx10 games. I also noticed that vista takes really long to shut down and when I say really long I mean it. I have a 3.4 ghz p4 ee with 2 gigs ram and it takes between 6-10 minutes to shut down ( estimate from the few times I have shut down). It takes so long to shut down that you will think your comp froze and will end up doing a hard shut down. Also vista froze up on one of the first times I started it. Another thing that makes me quite uncomfortable is vista is always connected to the net. I know it sounds a little crazy cause with internet nowadays pc's are always connected but I honestly feel like vista may be monitoring some activity and when my music cutoff and went dead I knew something was up. In my honest opinion I feel that vista did not come from the demands of the user but the wants of the music and movie industries. Vista is nothing more than a DRM tool. I was enticed by the pretty pictures and nice colors but all in all Vista is a visual upgrade. Thats why I was done with it in one day. You get it, install it, see its pretty and thats it. If you look at the state of things with music and movies you will realize that vista exist to get a tighter control on multimedia with DRM. There is no apparent need to switch to vista. Microsoft made reasons like security and dx10 but thats just how desperate they are. XP could have had dx10 and if it did, I doubt any gamer would touch vista. Just about every analyst sees that no one will update to vista immediately and the only way MS will spread the vista seed is by packaging it with new pc's. I think that right now vista is not a necessity but in about 5-10 years when xp gets old and people can't hack it you will see that either MS will have won or some other company will step up and start taking shares from MS. For the time being save your money and buy something useful. Vista won't be useful for another year or so for most and even then who knows what tricks MS will have up their sleeve.
