In response to
Darwin in another
thread, I decided to make this spinoff since the post got too long and off-topic-ish to put there.
So, up until now, my experience with Vista has been relatively limited. I've set up a couple of laptops for the museum, dealt with some minor and major frustrations, and that's basically it. So since I finally got a laptop (mark ye the historical date of October 2nd, 2008!) and needed to put an OS there, I decided to give Vista a proper spin. I've vowed to keep it on the laptop for at least the entire of October. Figured it'd only be fair to finally
immerse myself in it, if I want to keep bitching at it.
So, laptop specs:
Zepto Orion A15, 2048meg DDR2-800 RAM, 120gig 7200RPM harddrive, Intel GMA X4500HD graphics, 2.0GHz core2 duo P7350 CPU, Sata DVD-RW drive, Intel 5330AN Shirley Peak WiFi. All in all, a pretty sweet machine. Bluetooth makes it easy to sync my phone with
MyPhoneExplorer, and it's nice having an SD card reader for grabbing photos from my camera and transferring MP3s to my Sandisk Sansa E280 (finally got an 8gig SD Micro card for it
). I'm already finding myself using the laptop more than my workstation - gogogo reduced power consumption!
Yeah, the Zepto logo on the lid is lit. It's very discreet though, you only really notice it in a dark room... not like those obnoxious Mac apple logos
It has frozen a few times though, which I find a bit unsettling. Usually been related to things like using the card reader - I don't know if this is a Vista problem or it's a hardware issue. But there definitely was software Vista issues when the filesystem on the SD card from my camera... I'll eventually have to test with another OS, would suck if the hardware is flaky.
So... f0dder, has your new notebook arrived? What do you think of Vista? Inquiring minds want to know... -Darwin
Yeah, it arrived thursday (talk about waiting a looong time!). Didn't take long grabbing Vista64-business-SP1 from MSDNAA with 20mbit, and heck it almost took as long installing it (yeah, an exaggeration, but I had expected more of the new image-based install system).
I was shocked to see that the base install took up ~12 gigabytes
. So I ran the ISO through
vLite, and installed again, this time with a 32gig rather than 16gig system partition. Thankfully, the vLited install was down to 6gig, I can live with that I guess.
So... I've used Vista before, but this is the first time I "immense myself in it". My first impression is that "I can
probably live with this", and it's less sluggish than I expected. Even though there's "only" 2 gigs of RAM in it, it's comfortable to use, and stuff in general doesn't feel bad. Visual Studio 2008 and Eclipse run fine. The Intel GMA X4500HD seems pretty capable as well, it can run HL2 in 1280x800 with full details pretty smoothly, Aero runs smoothly... mostly.
I don't understand why things like scrolling contact list in MSN and resizing columns feels so damn sluggish. The column-resize thing might be restricted to things like stuff from the control panel, though, and those are generally extremely sluggish to resize. So perhaps those things are written using
WPF, and it's WPF that's a sloppy pig? Just guessing, but anything control-panel seems sluggish beyond belief.
The new explorer doesn't really get my fancy. I would probably be pretty darn frustrated if I had to use it, thankfully
xplorer2 works fine under Vista. And wtf does a thing like the "Views" in explorer have a vertical slider next to it? O_o - it feels so dumb. Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details? At least I can't find any obvious ways to turn those off. So long live x^2!
It also sucks that it's "Aero or nothing" - you can't get a classic look but keep the Aero acceleration. I know there's hacks to use custom themes (
WHY can't Microsoft just let third parties do custom themes without the hacky hoops?), and I'll look into that later, but it sucks sucks SUCKS that you're stuck with the pretty much sucky-looking and not very customizable Aero look if you want acceleration (and I do). Why can I no longer "Always show underline for hotkeys" as I could in XP? Why can't you tweak the color of the "selected item bar"? (I
already bitched about this). Fortunately, x^2 can be customized, so I can actually see which files I have selected.
I do like the black taskbar though, and the new start menu layout is also pretty great. Still doesn't beat
FARR, though!
When resuming from hibernate/standby/locked session, why doesn't the password editbox have keyboard focus?
Do standard fonts like Courier New look differently in Vista, or is it just me?
Consistent with the other Vista machines I've used, the graphics driver seems to crash fairly often, especially during an UAC screen-dimming thing. Sure, it's nice that the graphics driver now runs usermode and can auto-recover, but I get a feeling that the new graphics system by itself is less stable than XP was. Hopefully this matures with SP2 or Windows 7
I don't find UAC all that annoying, btw. Sure, I disabled it temporarily while setting up the machine, but once that's done, it's not
that bad. I probably do mess around with system settings a bit more than the usual Vista user though, so the popups do annoy me a bit every now and then - IMHO it should be possible to elevate yourself for a time period like a couple of minutes, so you could do whatever administrative tasks with only one UAC popup.
More to follow.
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