Windows Vista

[Kyobanim]

This is a quick and dirty review. If you want to bash Microsoft or any of it's products, open a new thread. If you want to make comparisons, open a new thread.


I've had the opportunity, at work, to test drive Windows Vista for several months. Until recently, I wouldn't have recommended it to my worse enemy. Since RC1 (Release Candidate 1) came out, my opinion has changed.

Here's specs on machines I have been testing on:

1. Dell Optiplex GX 620 - 2 GB mem, 160 GB SATA2 HD, 2 MB cache, 3.4 Duo Core processor, 256 MB ATI 600x PCIe video.

2. Dell Optiplex GX 520 - 1 GB mem, 80 GB SATA 2 HD, 2 MB Cache, 3.0 Duo Core, 128 mb onboard Intel PCIe video.

3. Dell Lattitude – 1 GB mem, 80 GB SATA, 2 MB cache, 1.83 Duo Core Centrino processor, 256 Mobile Intel graphics.

Versions: There are several versions of Vista. The one I have is the media center version which is the biggest one. Under that is one for Enterprise, small business and home use.

Security: One of the biggest improvements. First, in order to do anything in XP you had to have administrator privileges on the machine. This led to a serious spyware/malware problem as well as easy access for viruses. In Vista, the default administrator privileges are crippled. By this I mean, if you try to run an application that requires access to the OS you will be prompted with a pop up window for approval. The same thing happens if something comes in through the browser. This will give you the chance to stop spyware/malware from coming in. And this feature really works. I’ve been to some of the worse offender sites on the web and received no spyware. I will admit that the pop up approval window is annoying at first but after A while I got used to it. You can change this to allow full administrator privileges.

Stability: I haven’t crashed this yet and believe me, I have tried. It has been running for 2 weeks, 24/7. One of the things they have done with this is required fewer restarts when there is a problem or an app has been installed. If something freezes, the process is isolated and the system will try to clear the error and restart the app without affecting the system overall. So far it has worked, though I did give it a run for it’s money when I installed office 2007 beta and tried to connect Outlook to a GroupWise mail server.

Compatibility: If it works on your current system, it will work with Vista. I haven’t found any serious problems with software compatibility outside of drivers and Symantec Auto-protect. Auto-protect is turned off by Vista because Defender does the same thing, and it does it better. Novell hasn’t released a networking client yet though they do have one in Beta.

Hardware requirements: There has bee much ado about the increased hardware requirements to run Vista. Well, if you want to run the OS at peak visual capability then, yes, the average user will need to increase their hardware. By ‘peak’ visual capability I mean using the Aero visual interface which is, essentially a MAC experience. It looks nice and there are lots of cool things you can do, but it’s not required. This does take a decent video card but, nothing out of the ordinary. I am using it with a 128 MB shared memory onboard device.

Defender: Defender is the spyware/malware protection software that Microsoft acquired when it bought out the Giant Software company. This software was acknowledged by the IT industry as the best product on the market. It’s been in Beta with MS for about a year now. I believe that there are improvements in the version that is integrated into Vista.

Speed: Overall, Vista is quicker to do everything from boot to opening applications. I see little improvement with opening graphic applications like Photoshop or Corel Draw but once the app is open it’s very quick to operate, especially when rendering.

Navigation: There is a slight learning curve when using this for the first time. Things you used to have direct access to with a right click are sometimes buried 1 or 2 levels down. It’s not that big of a deal and in an IT situation, it keeps the less capable users from screwing something up that they don’t understand. Searching for files is quick as indexing is turned on from the get go. Applications are laid out on the Start menu in an easy to read format. So far, it has done a good job of organizing the crap I’ve been installing.

You can get a lot more information from the Microsoft.com/vista site.

I will continue this with more information as the testing progresses.

And BTW, for you server people, the next version of Windows server with ship with no GUI, strictly command line.

[mugwump]

Thanks for the review. Huh, works OK with 1 gig? That's good news. The compatibility report is also very good news for me. We are too small to spend time on betas -- I just worry instead. Do you know if this will ship with a full complement of RAID drivers -- LSI Logic for instance? We have a heavy hardware investment at the workstation level.

[Kyobanim]

I pulled a stick and made it a 512 ram PC and it ran fine, that was with shared video memory. The key is, you can dumb down the interface so you don't have all the overhead that requires the extensive RAM.

I did set BETA 2 to run on an Intel 2.8 GB proc with 512 and onboard 64 MB video but it was iffy at best. It was an old build so I don't know if it was a hardware or software problem. I should find the oldest craptastic machine we have laying around and try to get it to work.

I don't know about the RAID drivers but I'll shoot them an email and find out. I would suspect 'yes'. (Notice I didn't say assume).

[hoepoe]

Thanks Kyo

I am looking forward to replacing the XP my wife uses with Vista for several reasons;

1) More secure (for now)
2) Eye candy for me to play with
3) Just got a nice AMD64bit/1GB machine that simply does not work well with XP 64, so am awaiting Vista 64Bit to get full benefit of the processor.
4) I stick with the 'other OS' until i get a Mac (sorry, i had to throw that in!) :-)

Hoepoe