My first encounter with Windows Vista
I briefly used a vista laptop last friday.
The laptop had 512Mb ram, yet vista felt very slow… almost sluggish.
After some work trying to get it to connect to a wireless network, I eventually realised it was running on battery power. A quick flick of the power switch, and vista perked up.
Overall, once you look under the covers… past the annoying eye candy, its still very similar to XP.
I can now see why MS made ie7 so difficult to configure (and annoying to use)… so that it would fit into the vista look and feel 🙁
Yes, the extra security is great, it looks prettier, the nuts and bolts at the very lowest levels are probably completely different, but from what I saw, I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to get it.
Accordinging to my supplier, he will not be
getting XP after another month.
All the towers will come preloaded
with Vista home Basic.
Must admit, I am not impressed with
Vista. The different versions seem
to have been designed by bean
counters.
Home basic is Kmart Vista,and
unless you buy “Ultimate” each
version has a different feature
unavailable.
If I jump in, I’ll probably go with
the Business edition.
Hi david.
My supplier still offers XP (but they also have a few “non vista ready” computers)… Not sure how long before they have to drop XP…
Its a pity, as vista doesn’t feel like much of an advance on XP… the added security is probably embedded very deeply, but its intrusive enough, that most users will just bypass, or just blindly click “ok” to all security prompts they get.
The vista I was using had no passwords, but in the process of disabling nortons block of file sharing, setting up the “mshome” workgroup, and some network troubleshooting, I got asked “is it ok?” about 15 times in 1 hour.
By the end of the year, I’ll probably give Vista ultimate a try… but only to gain familiarity and for some troubleshooting… nothing serious.
Same here.
The main production pc’s will
be XP for some time.
A few of my tools don’t work under Vista
and updates are not yet available.
I think when Vista is mainstream the
fun will start.
Even IE7 is confusing people with
it’s new look.
I’ve spoken to many people (ie non-tech average people who need my help) about ie7, and they either don’t like it, or don’t care.
No one has actually said they like it better than ie6.
This might give linux / firefox / opera some more leverage… eventually.
I’ve had some people say “OMG, Vista will be so reliable, your business will suffer” Its looking it will be the opposite… Vista will probably generate more need for tech experts and trainers (like me :-))
Vista looks nice and works nice as long as you have plenty of RAM and hardware to support it. It’s funny my old Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of RAM works great with XP, but with Vista it would not run too good. It seems the sweet spot for RAM is 2GB with 4GB even better. It’s going to take some time before you can get a reasonably cheap computer that can run this even halfway decent. I suspect Linux will be used a lot more in the coming years because of this. If Apple would release OSX for standard PC hardware they could probably make a killing now considering how Vista turned out.
BTW, I tried out several laptops at a local store and the one with 1GB of RAM seemed sluggish, but the one with 2GB of RAM ran very smooth. I would hate to see it running on 512MB of RAM. That would be horrible. Well, enough babbling for now.
I think it gets very subjective. Since Vista has some kind of application cache, so that often used apps get cached, then most people who just use IE7 and lookout! express, probably can’t notice a slowdown. I found 512Mb is bareable, but I just used control panel, a command prompt, and IE.