Buena Vista!

(originally published 28 August 2008)

I have a confession to make… I was one of those people who snubbed Windows Vista. If I had been in San Francisco during the Mojave Experiment, I would have been one of those people who would have said how much they hated Windows Vista.

There would have been one small difference however: I had actually had some experience with Vista. I admit that my exposure was not extensive. In fact, it was only a few hours as I got two new laptops running for two people.

But for my home use, no experience with Vista.

I wanted to get Vista, I really did. But according to the tool Microsoft released that was to let you know which Vista you could run on your computer, I was stuck with Vista Home Basic for my four-year-old Dell desktop. So I decided that it wasn’t worth the monetary costs of either buying a new computer or upgrading my trusty XP based machine in order to use Vista.

So, I took on the idea that I didn’t need Vista, it was too buggy, too untested, too unstable. I would point out everything I ever saw about Vista being bad and use it as yet another point against ever using it.

Everything was just fine with Windows XP Pro, thank you very much!

Then something interesting happened.

My partner got a new computer with Windows Vista Home Premium. And I was completely amazed that as soon as he hooked up the computer, it was ready to go. No issues, no configuring an Internet connection, nothing. It was plug and play all the way.

He’s had the computer for about 3 weeks, and I have yet to spend more than 10 minutes on it to play with it. But I got jealous because he had this really good looking, slick new operating system and I was stuck with XP.

But, I just told myself I would eventually either get a new computer of my own, or take his when he decided to replace it with something better.

But then another event took place which led to an even more interesting event: I went to a Microsoft Developers Network event about .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. And I got a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate for attending.

So, I now had a copy of the OS for myself, but according to Microsoft my old Dell just wasn’t going to run it.

Or would it?

According to the package, I needed a 1 GHz processor. I have a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor. I needed 1 GB of RAM, which I have now (but can upgrade to 4 GB for less than $100). I needed a 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB free. I had a fresh 250 GB hard drive with absolutely nothing on it (a secondary drive I never used before). So far so good!

But the biggest issue would be the video card. It was as old as the computer, and wasn’t even middle of the line when I got it. But according to the requirements it needed to support DirectX-9. I was currently using DirectX-10 on my XP set-up, so Windows Vista might actually work in my computer, right?

There was only one way to find out, of course. I opened my computer up, took out the 80 GB and 250 GB hard drives that were already in there, installed the other 250 GB hard drive I had and started a fresh Windows Vista install.

I really wish I had taken some photographs of the warning messages that came up as I was installing Vista onto my computer. They made it sound as if installing this program was going to be a very long, extremely involved process. Yet within an hour, I had Vista Ultimate up and running on my computer. No problems at all.

Now it came time to play around. There were some things I needed to do in order for Vista to be perfect for me: install my Zune software, install Office 2007, install Live Writer, etc.

Once that was done, I then checked for updates and found over 40 updates ready to download and install.

Here is where I made my first mistake: I didn’t look at what updates were available. I just selected all of them and said go for it.

Why do I need the Croatian Language Pack? Why do I need the Norwegian Language Pack? Turns out that most of the available downloads were language packs that I would never need or use.

But there was one update that I got that made me realize just how different Vista Ultimate is from Home Premium: DreamScene. This is an update to the display system of Vista. Now, instead of just a color or photo being my background, I can have movies as my desktop background. This was totally cool! I have some video content for my Zune, so I loaded one of those files.

There was no sound, of course, but here I was watching a movie play in the background of my desktop as I worked with my files and programs!

Another download was a new game: Hold ‘Em. Now I can play poker on my computer without having to download anything. Okay, so it’s not really that big a deal, but it’s still something XP couldn’t do.

Next I discovered that Ultimate also has Media Center as part of it (maybe they all do, I am not sure). This was pretty cool! I can record TV shows to my computer, just like other people do with their TiVos? Sold!

But, there was one thing that really made me sit up and take notice: folder navigation.

In XP, if you directed yourself into several layers of sub-folders, and needed to move back up a number of layers, you needed to hit either the UP button or Back button several times to get there. In Vista, just click on the path for the folder you want.

As an example, let’s say in Vista you are in folder C:/Program Files/Windows/Music/80s/D/Duran/Duran Duran/Rio/music and wanted to go back to the 80s folder, you would just click on the 80s folder in the address field. In XP, you would have to click on the UP button 5 times to get back there.

Now, it might seem that I am gushing over little things here. But that is because I have only seen the little things so far. I have only had Vista on my computer for 2 days now, so I am still very much learning.

But what I have seen so far makes me wonder why the hell I didn’t install this much sooner!

UPDATE –

This post was originally put into place just before Labor Day 2008, and was one of the items that was destroyed in trying to get Google to stop banning my site.

Since I originally posted it, I have upgraded the RAM to 4 gigabytes and have learned a few more things about Vista that really please me.

First up is the window preview in the task bar. If you have multiple windows open, simple place your mouse over the task bar item and it will give you a preview of what it is.

Next is the Window Switcher. Click the little icon and it opens all windows in a 3-D diagonal so that you can see and select from the group what you are trying to get to.

Finally, Vista seems to have a more intuitive menu system. I have found that I am able to find programs much faster with Vista than I could with XP. And some of the Windows system programs are better named. For example, instead of Add and Remove Software, it’s now called Programs and Features. Just seems to make more sense to me.

My partner commented that Vista looked and worked more like the Apple OSX system. I do not agree with that statement. If anything, I think Vista looks and works better than OSX.

And now that I have had a few weeks of practice with it, I really like what Microsoft has done.

Vista is, by far, the best operating system Microsoft has ever created.