I recently installed the 64-bit edition of Microsoft's latest OS, Vista. I thought I'd share some of my findings thus far. My system spec is as follows: AMD Athlon 4800+ X2, 2 gigs ram, Creative X-FI, Seagate Cheetah X15.3 SCSI drive, Geforce 7800GTX 256MB.
- UAC is annoying as HELL. I turned it off (thank god I can do that). I can’t even copy files from one folder to another with 2 security dialog boxes appearing first. WHAT?!
- No sound. Sucks
- Installed latest nVidia display drivers which helped. I noticed that certain graphic display elements are a little slow (especially when things move in the start bar)
- Search works really well. I feel like I’m using Spotlight for the mac (integrates with office 2007 as well which is sweet)
- The organization of the configuration of the OS seems to be pretty scattered. In other words, I feel like I have to click through quite a few pages, tabs, all over the OS to fine tune it the way I want.. They seem to bury a lot of choices so most people won’t find em. (Is this usability? No.)
- Speed-wise, it seems not too shabby for a beta OS. Definitely little slower than XP.
- I cannot figure out how to restart Vista when connected via remote desktop. The only thing I can seem to do is log out or lock the PC. So if I am in the other room and have to reboot my box, I have to walk to the physical machine, login, and restart it
- The performance monitor in Vista is AWESOME. It shows all the processes broken down into those which use the most CPU/ram/disk.. so I can quickly see which apps have been hitting my disk the most, which are reading/writing from the network the most, etc etc. It’s the best system monitor I’ve seen on any OS yet.
- Why the heck are my desktop icons so freakin big? It’s annoying. I hate big icons
- I’m having trouble getting used to the new explorer and it’s sorting. There is no “list” view anymore. The sorting of files is done in 2 columns and instead of 5 sequential files listed one after another, they alternate between 2 columns in the list. Highly annoying.
- I have Outlook 2007, firefox, AIM, Yahoo, and uTorrent open and I am at 1.8 gigs of ram used. WTF. How am I supposed to even open IntelliJ or run any kind of services like a database or application server on this?
- X-FI doesn't work so tried Audigy 2. Suprise, that doesn’t work either. Creative REALLY sucks.
- I have “My Documents” folder on another drive other than my C drive. I can’t find a way to change the default location to the new one.
- Somehow my speedy OCZ 2 gig USB key doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for using the new “ReadyDrive” feature where it caches things on your USB sticks? This key is one of the fastest out there. Not sure what’s up with that.
- I’ve used 22 gigabytes on my C drive and I’ve only installed Vista/Firefox/Office 2007 Beta 2
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