Anthony’s Ramblings

http://forums.hhsn.net

After a long internal debate, I decided to bring them back. Although none of the old/original posts exist, I hope that it’ll become a little something that’ll use some of the wasted CPU cycles of my server.

Any comments/suggestions about the forums are welcomed and appreciated.

Pass the word around, please!

Last weekend I obtained a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. I didn’t really expect much out of it as I’m not really a fan and haven’t heard any worthwhile testimony on why anybody should be using it. However, I still felt the urge to check it out anyway. So, I moved partitions around on my Dimension’s 160 GB hard drive and plopped Vista on it.

The first thing I expected was slowness. I know the system requirements for Vista are pretty high with a minimum 1 GHz CPU and 512 MB RAM. I’ve even heard that Vista runs best with 4 GB RAM! With that said, my Dimension only has a P4 2.8GHz CPU and 1.5 GB RAM. Surprisingly, it’s actually very responsive. With anti-virus software installed, it feels pretty close to how responsive XP is on this machine.

It was a little frustrating figuring out where Microsoft decided to stash things this time around. One thing that MS has actually handled quite well until now was that the transition between versions of Windows never killed anybody. Let me tell you, A LOT has changed in Vista. From somethings as simple as “My Documents” being changed to broken down folders inside your user’s home directory to “My Computer” being re-named just plain ‘ol “Computer”, to complete path changes (no more Documents and Settings folder, it’s now a Mac-ish /Users folder) and preference relocations (they’ve combined all network interfaces into a what wants to be an intuitive interface, but coming from XP it took me a minute to figure it out).

I had also expected to run into the incompatibility problems with installing older applications, but everything that I have installed this far has worked without a hitch. I haven’t tried any older games (I love Sim City 3000 ), so we’ll see.

Aero is pretty neat. It’s not an amazing must-have, but does show that Windows has come a long way. Windows fade in and out, translucent titlebars and taskbar, along with other fancy touches here and there. However, you must have a fairly beefy video card to get the full Aero effect. Luckily, the GeForce 6800 XT I bought a few weeks ago supports it very nicely.

The alert dialog boxes that appear when certain tasks are performed isn’t as annoying as I thought it’d be. It’s just like when you perform a task that requires root privileges to run in Ubuntu and you are prompted for your password, except that you aren’t prompted for a password. I can see how this is pointless, as a user who isn’t sure what is going on could just as easily click “continue” and allow potentially bad tasks to run. Also, the alerts aren’t always descriptive. That can add to a user going “I don’t know *clicks continue*?”

Brianna decided to be a Vista guinea pig as well. She let me wipe her laptop and put Vista on it…from SCRATCH! I wish she’d let me do that with Linux. Oh well!

In summary, Vista is (in my opinion) a little more pretty than previous versions of Windows. I don’t have any major complaints, yet, nor do I have anything to rant and rave about. People have said that it’s the next Windows ME. I can agree, but so far without as many bugs.