Vista: The View from Here
I wanted to post a little bit about my experiences with Vista.
Ok so I had a duel boot transition period while I set myself up on Vista. I didn't want any downtime so I kept XP running on one partition, and I decided to install Vista on another.
XP was ALREADY duel booting: I had a trial of Windows Media Centre 2005 running on another partition already and so was receiving the usual boot menu at startup. Since I bought Vista Ultimate which includes Media Centre, I decided to blow away that partition and use it for Vista.
Anyway after the install, my machine now asks me at boot up if I want to run:
1) Windows Vista
2) An earlier version of windows
Because I was still running my life from XP, choosing option 2 then presents me with my OLD bootup menu:
1) Windows XP
2) Windows Media Centre
Weird! Media centre is gone because of the Vista install. I guess its not very good at tidying up the MBR. What's worse is that I later decided to merge 2 partitions into 1 to install Vista again. I don't own partition magic, so was forced to blow away the partitions and start again. Now I get the following menu at startup:
1) Windows Vista
2) Windows Vista
3) An earlier version of windows
... and if you press 3, you get my old boot menu.
Naturally all this is not a big deal, but rather silly none-the-less. No doubt there are suitable records to edit to fix this. I'll find them sooner or later.
All in all, I quite like Vista. I especially like the sidebar and associated gadgets. There is an RSS reader that shows the feeds you have setup in IE7. There's a nice little picture show that cycles continuously, and there's also a weather gadget that shows Brisbane weather and temperature (although yesterday it said it was 22 degrees when I was sweating like a pig). You can download more gadgets as well... I found a nice simple CPU metre which is designed for dual core CPUs; it shows both cores, as well as RAM usage.
It's worth mentioning here that my RAM usage is sitting at over 1gb... and that's with only this IE window open. Vista is damn hungry!
One final thing. The commercial's that MAC have been showing on TV; you know the ones, with the 2 guys talking. Well there's one where PC comes to a "sad realisation" about how annoying his security software is. I can tell you that it is quite true... the amount of times during install that I got asked "Cancel or Allow" was amazing; having said that everytime it happened I was quite entertained, simply because of those Mac commercials. For me, it seems that those commercials softened the blow.
All up, I'm pretty happy. I'm still learning how to get around the OS and options. Naturally some software doesn't work, but nothing too stressful.
Ok so I had a duel boot transition period while I set myself up on Vista. I didn't want any downtime so I kept XP running on one partition, and I decided to install Vista on another.
XP was ALREADY duel booting: I had a trial of Windows Media Centre 2005 running on another partition already and so was receiving the usual boot menu at startup. Since I bought Vista Ultimate which includes Media Centre, I decided to blow away that partition and use it for Vista.
Anyway after the install, my machine now asks me at boot up if I want to run:
1) Windows Vista
2) An earlier version of windows
Because I was still running my life from XP, choosing option 2 then presents me with my OLD bootup menu:
1) Windows XP
2) Windows Media Centre
Weird! Media centre is gone because of the Vista install. I guess its not very good at tidying up the MBR. What's worse is that I later decided to merge 2 partitions into 1 to install Vista again. I don't own partition magic, so was forced to blow away the partitions and start again. Now I get the following menu at startup:
1) Windows Vista
2) Windows Vista
3) An earlier version of windows
... and if you press 3, you get my old boot menu.
Naturally all this is not a big deal, but rather silly none-the-less. No doubt there are suitable records to edit to fix this. I'll find them sooner or later.
All in all, I quite like Vista. I especially like the sidebar and associated gadgets. There is an RSS reader that shows the feeds you have setup in IE7. There's a nice little picture show that cycles continuously, and there's also a weather gadget that shows Brisbane weather and temperature (although yesterday it said it was 22 degrees when I was sweating like a pig). You can download more gadgets as well... I found a nice simple CPU metre which is designed for dual core CPUs; it shows both cores, as well as RAM usage.
It's worth mentioning here that my RAM usage is sitting at over 1gb... and that's with only this IE window open. Vista is damn hungry!
One final thing. The commercial's that MAC have been showing on TV; you know the ones, with the 2 guys talking. Well there's one where PC comes to a "sad realisation" about how annoying his security software is. I can tell you that it is quite true... the amount of times during install that I got asked "Cancel or Allow" was amazing; having said that everytime it happened I was quite entertained, simply because of those Mac commercials. For me, it seems that those commercials softened the blow.
All up, I'm pretty happy. I'm still learning how to get around the OS and options. Naturally some software doesn't work, but nothing too stressful.
4 Comments:
Thought you might like to read this piece by Jeff Attwood on why Vista uses so much memory:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html
By Yuvi Panda, At 11 May 2007 03:19
And, have a lot of fun with Vista Ultimate: All I've got is Longhorn Server Beta3.... :(
By Yuvi Panda, At 11 May 2007 03:20
Hey thanks for that link. It explains a lot and it makes sense that "unused cache is wasted cache". Its a good comparison for RAM.
By Steven Nagy, At 11 May 2007 06:53
So, happy about the higher RAM usage? :D
By Yuvi Panda, At 11 May 2007 11:24
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