ASM Community

Never thought I would buy it, but I was at the store and it piqued my curiosity. I am about to install Windows Vista "Home Premium" edition. I will let you know how it goes... if I survive :P

Installed all the updates. Had to switch from using "Windows Vista Basic" (2D theme) to using "Windows Aero" (3D theme), now everything looks pretty sweet. You can finally change the ambient window color. When you close/minimize/maximize programs, it looks like something out of Star Trek :P

The upgrade from XP was flawless. The only thing I manually have to do is uninstall and re-install my anti-virus software. Start-up did seem a bit slower, but I always use "stand-by" mode anyhow.

So far, I think Vista is a major improvement over XP in terms of the UI. When I was using the 2D theme, it seemed a bit sluggish, but not as bad as one could imagine when dealing with MS software... especially considering how hard I was running the HD with updates and the like. The 3D theme is just about a fast as XP's UI was.

Some things have changed around, like the "Add/Remove Programs" now being "Programs and Features" in the Control Panel. The Start Menu program list is now organized and won't fly off the edge of your screen :)

CTRL+ALT+DEL takes you to an up-to-date version of what Windows2K had (instead of simply opening the Task Manager like XP does). The Task Manager has another tab for "Services", right next to the "Processes" tab. The "Performance" tab is organized much better, it displays Physical Memory usage (Total/Cache/Free), Kernel Memory usage (Total/Paged/Nonpaged), and general System info (Handles/Threads/Processes/Up Time/Page File).

As another plus, they finally got rid of that annoying default "dog" animation for their Search mechanism.

Hopefully Vista will inspire device manufacturers to develop vast/stable 64-bit drivers, something XP-64 failed to encourage.

The biggest downside is the bloat. Vista (Home Premium) needed 15GB of free space. I am just thankful I have a fast enough processor and enough RAM to wade through all that software fat.

I do wish the price would come down a bit, as well. A $50 price drop would be a nice gesture on Microsoft's behalf. I paid around $150 for "Home Premium" and "Home Basic" was around $100. These were "upgrade" prices as well. Oh well, I'll survive ;)

All-in-all, I think Microsoft did a pretty good job with Vista :thumbsup:

Vista is going to have to go through its natural "phases" that all massively used software does, so let's hope they keep up the good work over that time.

PS: For anyone who upgrades to Vista with a wireless connection that is not broadcasted, you must change that connection to "connect to network even when not broadcasting" or the like for it to work.

OK, found out it is the "Multilanguage User Interface" (MUI) in whole and that it only comes with Windows Vista Ultimate. There is a lesser thing called a "Language Interface Pack" (LIP) for all versions of Windows vista. MUI guarantees nearly full UI translation. LIP offers partial UI translation of "the most widely used areas of the user interface" with fall-back to a "parent language" as Microsoft puts. Basically, it is a tactic to drive you to buy Ultimate edition.

I work under Admin, as always. There is a new twist to running programs though. Any "untrusted programs" have to be authorized to run by the user. For example, I uninstalled the Microsoft 2003 Trial that was installed when it was WinXP, and during the (un)installation, it tried to start another program, which was brought to my attention. I had to pick whether to allow it to run or not. It gets a bit annoying, but it only happens to programs that are not installed (registry?) and there is less chance for malware to manifest... I think it is worth it :)

From the "Security" tab view, it seems like it is exactly the same. I never messed with such things much, however.

The separation between "Standard User" and "Administrator" in the user config is the same as well.

Considering how much I've encountered so far, there is probably some extra things considering group/user security.

Compatibility mode has added "Windows XP (SP2)" and "Windows Server 2003 (SP1)".

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal both complain that everything under Vista has long been on a Mac.

Very fast vista installation :D :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVbf9tOGwno

Although visuals were mentioned, it wasn't the visuals only they talked about. 

They meant stuff like search where the only difference was placement on the desktop, otherwise it was identical.  Don't recall the five or six items they talked about.