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I bought Vista the other day purely on impulse. I was in Dick Smith looking for a mouse for Mina’s computer (shut up — yes, she has her own computer) and the pretty display and $180 pricetag beckoned with new shininess. I nursed it for a few days before finally installing it, and I have to say, I am actually very pleasantly surprised.

I know that the Slashdot and Whirlpool geeks will talk about performance issues and the driver and compatibility issues that are inevitable with a brand new OS - but these guys are also anti-Microsoft, Linux lovers, who, despite making a very good operating system cannot make things pretty or usable to save their lives. Yes. There, I said it. Geeks cannot design for shit.

I also have to say that I have often been drawn to OSX and a pretty G5 Mac lately, what with all the widgets and the dock and the pretty window effects and, well, the ability of Apple to design an interface doesn’t really need to be mentioned here because we all know that Windows users are not worthy of a person in cargo pants that can afford a $15,000 PC.

Until now.

I guess when you have a long and laboured history with Microsoft, and you have read all the “meh” reviews on the usual geek sites, it is no wonder that I was skeptical. And when I first installed Vista, I had a problem with my RAID Controller and Firefox. The RAID Controller problem was my own — Vista was looking for drivers for a piece of hardware that I had forgotten was in there-and-I-swear-that-all-I-did-last-time-was-just-put-mainboard-driver-disk-in… in short, it was my own fault. The only drivers I had to actually install were my printer drivers. More on hardware in a minute though.

I do have to say that my initial thoughts about my impulse-purchased Vista Upgrade came to fruition when I went to open the box. I couldn’t work out how to open the bloody thing, and I remember uttering under my breath that I hope Vista is more user friendly than the damn packaging. It was kinda a nice experience though, being my first legitimate copy of Windows since….Windows 98. Yes, bad Téa… but it certainly made me feel all self righteous and legal I have to say. I put the disk in and I was greeted with something very pretty. Noice.

Installation was piss easy. Just make sure you have everything plugged in and off you go. Wait about half an hour and its done.

The funny thing about this whole experience was that when I actually loaded Vista for the first time, I actually did say “Wow”. Either my brain is hardwired to clever advertising campaigns or this is actually a very nice OS. And as much as it pains me to say it about a Microsoft product - it is most certainly the latter.

And the funny thing is, that you can see all the funny things that Microsoft have so obviously ripped off, like the tabbed browsing in IE7, the Window Effects and the…umm… Gadgets (no, I did NOT say Widgets. I said GADGETS! hee!), but they have actually implemented them in a way that you can actually forgive them for a moment for being the soulless copycat cunts that they are.

I am impressed by how Vista has handled all my hardware. It even recognised my graphics tablet right off the bat and my $18 Strathfield webcam. The only thing I needed to actually install was my Canon printer, and that was a breeze.
I am also impressed with the way that multimedia has been handled by Vista. We have a Wireless Media Player that streams my torrented TV sho-err I mean “home movies” to our big screen TV, and it has handled all of these things pretty seamlessly. After downloading Windows Media Player 11 and hating it, I can now see the bigger picture and it most definitely fits with the whole Vista experience.
I had to turn off the User Protection stuff because it was driving me bonkers and broke Firefox (yes Shandar love, I WORKED IT OUT AND CAN FIX YOUR PC! Aren’t I a genius?), but when I disabled that, MSN Messenger (of all things) decided it didn’t want to play. At the time of writing I have not put my Adobe Creative Suite or Macromedia Suite on it - but I don’t envisage any major problems.

So is it worth the upgrade? I will actually say yes with a BUT. The BUT being that you need to be confident that you have enough RAM and Processing Power to make it all pretty-like. I won’t really know how it compares to XP performance wise until I have loaded it with all the crap that normally slows my PC down (Photoshop, Flash, Video Editing, Music software etc…). I haven’t benchmarked it, haven’t looked under the hood, but boy, is it slick.

I know that in the Open Source fanboi world it doesn’t count for much (which is why Linux will never be mainstream), but for someone like me, who can easily stare at a screen for 16 hours a day, aesthetics and usability DO MATTER. And Vista has this.

Besides, its shiny. Its new. Its an opportunity for me to dodge work and play around. And who can complain about that?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:48 pm and is filed under General, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.