Thoughts about Vista after using it for a week

[ToyotaNSaturn]

OS:
Vista Ultimate 32 bit

Computer:
HP Pavilion zv6000 AMD 3500+
2 GB RAM (2x1GB DIMM)
80GB 7200RPM Seagate laptop hard disk
Broadcom Built-in wireless (NOT switchable to Intel miniPCI, I tried)

Installation was painless. However, it didn't find the modem. I don't use the modem, so it doesn't matter to me. Vista *SHOULD* find the modem IMO....

Open Office 2.2 is definitely faster than on this same PC with XP (w/SP2). SuSE 10.2 with OpenOffice 2.1 is quicker than XP's performance, but not as spritely as Vista.

FireFox works like a charm.

The Cisco VPN client is really a piece of junk. It disconnects randomly. When going to reconnect, it won't let you. The solution? Reboot! Ahhh...we've come a long way with Windows haven't we?

Running GPO-based login scripts doesn't work if the users are local admins of the machine. This is because the explorer process runs under a user token, and the login scripts run under an admin token. This is bad. This also means that one HAS to turn off UAC to make this work as desired. Or pull the users from the local admin group, which is NOT an option for piggy-fat corporate applications (Win32 apps) that DEMAND that the end-user is in the local admin group.

I'm not using any Antivirus programs, nor do I plan to.

All in all, I give it a 7. The interface is nice, but a WinXP SP2 user can get the Vista Transformation Pack for free and make XP look and feel much like Vista.

It's nice for home use. For corporate use, XP is the way to go.


And, you could have guessed, I'm writing this from my Mac.

 

[bar1]

I use Linux, Ubuntu. It's free, fast and secure. Can you say that about any M$ product?

 

[Volvohead]

We replaced a family member's system a couple weeks ago. All he ever does is surf the net and get e-mails. As he uses no other software that would require Windows, we got him an iMac with Tiger. A very impressive OS so far.

 

[55Test]

I've been using Vista for about 2 weeks now. Seems pretty stable, although I notice it does take a rather long time to fully load up. I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 AMD64 live DVD, can't really comment on it because I can't get connected to my wireless network.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Vista has frustrated me one too many times as the wireless networking just turns off and refuses to reconnect for no apparent reason. Rebooting every couple hours isn't fun.

Went to HP's site looking for updated Broadcom mini PCI wireless drivers, and of course, this laptop is not supported with Vista, thus there are no updated wireless drivers. (DUH! this isn't too difficult to figure out...they want to sell you a NEW laptop!)

So I've pulled the Vista hard drive and put the hard drive with the regular ol' WinXP installation back in the computer. At least the networking is stable.

One thing that jumped out at me when rebooting back into the "old" WinXP system that has the Vista Transformation Pack installed on it, was how much un-different the end-user experience is between Vista and WinXP with VTP.

55, wireless isn't fun when a vendor doesn't supply everything needed to make it run. SUSE 10.2 worked fine on this very laptop at it auto-loaded the ndiswrapper making the wireless work A-OK without much, if any, user intervention.

 

[Mystic]

One thing that really impresses me about Vista is that right away most of my software and hardware would work with it. For example, I had some software dating back to 2003 and 2004 and the software ran without problems. Most of my hardware also works just fine. The one major exception is a Nikon dedicated film scanner but Nikon always seems to be slow updating their software for new operating systems. In the case of the Nikon scanner they stopped updating for the Mac around about Mac OS 10.1 or 10.2 or so. In other words a long time ago. Nikon may develop Vista drivers for their scanner software but you can probably forget about Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5 support. Probably Nikon will drop dedicated film scanners completely anyway, just like they stopped production of most of their film cameras.