makeshiftmind

I’m writing this blog post on my one-day-old install of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I spent Friday night backing up my data to my laptop and installing Vista on my desktop computer, and I thought I’d just post a few of my first impressions.

First, my system specs are:
AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+
2 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT

which means I have plenty of juice to run the Vista Aero user interface, which looks mighty nice and has a number of helpful new navigation features. I won’t comment on Microsoft’s inspiration for some of these GUI enhancements (*cough* Apple *cough*), but regardless, they make the user experience more enjoyable and offer some nice eye candy to entertain geeks like me.

Beyond the white-washing, however, Vista is a little bit of a unique beast. One thing that I’ve had to grapple with is something called “administrator mode” when running certain programs. Apparently, even though my user is set up as the computer administrator, there are certain privileges that I don’t have by default (I suspect no actual “user” has these privileges on the system), so if a program needs access to certain directories that are “off limits” to everyone but the system itself, I have to launch the program in “administrator mode”. This is sort of like running a program using “sudo” in Ubuntu Linux. One of the more annoying “features” of Vista are the constant pop-ups that say “are YOU the one running this program? Do you want to continue running it?” — apparently a somewhat, uh, interesting way to enforce security (Apple has a rather illustrative commercial of this feature called “Security” that causes me to chuckle every time I see it). I suspect, however, that there are probably things I can do to tweak this behavior and make it less whiny, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet.

Another interesting feature of Vista is the fact that it continually defragments when the computer is idle (at least, that’s what I’ve read). Objections to defragmentation in general aside, this is actually a pretty clever way to ensure that a user’s Windows PC remains optimally. Most users don’t know what “defragmentation” is, so its best to keep it under wraps, working behind the scenes. And it makes life easier for me because I don’t have to manually mess with it.

Vista includes a handful of new programs that are aimed at making users more productive in general life as well. For example, a slimmed down version of Outlook’s calendar and email client are installed by default, and are pretty sharp from what I can tell. Again, I won’t comment on Microsoft’s inspiration for these (*cough* Apple *cough*), but it is nice that Outlook Express (oh the horror!) has finally been replaced, and the calendar is quite pleasant to use.

The indexing service on Windows has improved as well. You can actually specify what directories to index, and Windows will use these directories during searches so that you get optimal results (think Google Desktop). The advanced search features let you search outside of the indexed directories as well, so you’re not limited to an all-or-nothing approach to indexing, as in previous versions of Windows. This means that the indexing service only refreshes when you add new content to indexed directories.

Windows Update has also received an overhaul, and operates as a stand-alone application outside of Internet Explorer. You can acquire the Office update plugin which will make sure that your Office software stays up-to-date as well, instead of having to go to a separate Microsoft Office update site to get the Office downloads.

Overall, I am impressed with Vista, aside from a few driver incompatibilities and minor bugs I’ve encountered. I don’t think the upgrade cost is justified if you’re content with Windows XP, but if you buy a new PC with Vista pre-loaded, you’ll probably be happy with what you get.

Here is a piece of legislation that EVERYONE can support. It will require all elected Representatives and Senators to endure the public reading of each bill in their respective chambers before the bill can be voted on. The goal is to cut down on pork and last-minute stealth clauses make their way into our laws because stupid people run our country. The fact that our elected officials can vote on laws that they don’t even read makes me ill.

I am VINDICATED!