Windows Vista

A while ago I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my new fast computer. I installed Vista on a separate internal SATA hard drive separate from my XP drive (IDE). In order to swap between operating systems I do have to go into the system BIOS and tell it to use the SATA (Vista) or IDE (XP) drive to boot from instead of putting both on the same drive and using the startup manager to switch. I don't know what is safer....but so far this seems to be working. I'm a little paranoid about putting both operating systems on the same drive but I suppose eventually that would keep the computer cooler having fewer drives inside.

There are things I really like about Vista and things I really don't like. The graphics are great. My games play very smoothly on the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor in conjunction with the nVidia 8500GT running DirectX 10. I think it looks better than the same hardware on Windows XP using DirectX 9.0c. I've been playing Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Vegas, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X. All look really good. Might look better on a better graphics card, but not worth the extra $150 to me for as little as I get to play.

Other things I like about Vista are pretty minor but cool. A search within the start menu is nice. If you're looking to launch a program that isn't in the 'START' menu, instead of doing the old Start:All Programs then hunting around for it, you can actually type in the name of the program you're looking for and it'll show up. Nice! Also when you want to rename a file in the finder, you can click on it and instead of it highlighting the entire name including the file extension, it only highlights the name....not the extension. Makes renaming files a lot faster and easier...and safer!

Vista has a much faster install time than Windows XP, and a much faster repair time as well. In my attempts to resurrect my XP system drive, I corrupted something on my Vista drive and it wouldn't boot. I was able to 'repair' by booting off the Vista install CD and the repair went very quickly unlike a repair in XP which basically reinstalls the OS.

Things that are really annoying are the lame administrator security alerts. "You need administrator rights to do this, click here to continue". So you click there and it does what it was supposed to. The problem is that I only have one user account on the computer....and it's an administrator. So I already HAVE administrator privileges. Annoying. I haven't done much research into this but maybe there is a way to disable these alerts...probably not but it would be nice!

I'm using the Windows Vista Aero 'theme' since my system is beefy enough to handle it. It looks great and all the windows have these zoom.fade effects which look nice when windows open or close. The Alt+Tab interface is cool, instead of having tiny thumbnails of the open windows to switch between, the sample windows are pretty big so you can actually see what you are choosing. Also when you mouse over the open windows down in the task bar, a decent sized thumbnail shows up down there too. Makes it a little easier to see what window you are about to open.

I haven't explored all the features in Vista and probably should go through the "what's new" or even the "welcome to Vista" stuff.....eventually I will. But for now, these are the things I noticed right off the bat.