FWIW: Vista Home Premium Report

[mwfanelli]

Well, I got my new laptop a few days ago (in the middle of a major snow/ice storm) and this is the first time I've had the opportunity to use an Internet connection since. The laptop came with Vista Home Premium installed even though I asked for XP Professional. The XP OEM disks are on their way. But, I might as well play with Vista a little bit. So I did.

I am amazed at how good some things are. There is not a big external change from XP but it is set up better. In XP, I always chose to go with the old-fashioned look and feel. With Vista, the changes, although subtle, make using the new interface a much better choice.

The fancy windows look nice but are just silly nonsense, almost too "girlie-girl Mac-ish" for me. :-) But they do run smoothly albeit using 2 Gig of memory. That's the minimum usable memory for Vista (...as well as for MacIntel. What's with the bloat on these new operating systems?).

The system controls are all easier to understand and have added graphics. I like the Network Center: it shows me how dead the college Internet connection was and where in the line the problem was. The My Computer is extremely visual, giving lots of information at a glance. Icons are clean and modern, plus they are much easier to distinguish than the XP versions.

The default games are very enhanced, my good old Solitaire is juiced up quite a bit. OK, OK... I'm not some young gamer!

My USB drives (external hard drives and keys) all work fine as do my printers and scanner.

Bad news so far: every system upgrade downloaded from Windows Update has required a restart. That went away with XP, has it come back once again?

People have complained about applications being incompatible. In less than an 45 minutes I installed all of the following, all without doing anything special or setting any properties. They all work flawlessly and very fast without any glitches:

UltraEdit
Thunderbird
Firefox
Opera
MozBackup
Picture Window Pro V4
Open Office
ActivePerl
Java SDK with NetBeans 5
Microsoft Visual Studio (VB) Express with SQL Server Express
Folding@Home
MathType
Scilab
Spybot S&D
Microsoft Office 2003
Epson Perfection 1200 Photo scanner
Epson C64 printer
HP 6800 printer

The only three applications I skipped were:

Zone Alarm (free): they are working on a Vista version.
TrueCrypt (free): they are working on a Vista version.
iTunes (free): Well, Apple software, who knows when or whether it will ever work right! Apple's solution? Don't buy Vista!

I have decided to keep Vista Home Premium in spite of my fear of being an early adopter. May the Computer Gods save my soul.

[Photo-John]

Thanks for making this post, Michael. Since most of us are eventually going to have to face the reality of a Vista upgrade, it's good to hear from someone who's already done it. It sounds like it's going very well, aside from the memory demands, which seem ridiculous. What's the minimum required memory, anyway? My laptop is running fine on XP with 512 megs of RAM, and I only upgraded it from 256 about a month ago! I hate upgrading! But Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are probably going to dictate some sort of upgrade soon. I know I can't run either one on my laptop and the desktop at home is running Windows 2000. So pretty soon I'm going to have to do something.

[mwfanelli]

Thanks for making this post, Michael. Since most of us are eventually going to have to face the reality of a Vista upgrade, it's good to hear from someone who's already done it. It sounds like it's going very well, aside from the memory demands, which seem ridiculous. What's the minimum required memory, anyway? My laptop is running fine on XP with 512 megs of RAM, and I only upgraded it from 256 about a month ago! I hate upgrading! But Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are probably going to dictate some sort of upgrade soon. I know I can't run either one on my laptop and the desktop at home is running Windows 2000. So pretty soon I'm going to have to do something.

The stated minimum is 1 gig but that will be pretty slow. My desktop still runs XP Pro fast and fine in 512 Meg. The memory is always there in Vista, at least according to the meters and stats. I have opened up a zillion apps at the same time with no problems. But with 1 Gig the windows lag. Same thing when I worked with those MacIntels. I have no idea at all what's going on with that. FWIW, my hard drive is a standard 5400 not the faster 7200 so the paging file will not be all that quick.

[freygr]

I would be worried as Vistra has a big security problem with voice recognition as a sound file from the web can enable the voice recognition and do nasty things to your data, or install programs.

[mwfanelli]

Where is a referencev to this problem? I have not seen it mentioned at all.

Thanks.

[Lionheart]

I would recommend 2 GB's minimum with Vista. I've been playing with my Vista install the last couple of weeks, and changing out my RAM, and 4 GB is the fastest config on my rig. 1 GB is a dog, although my hard drives are 7200 rpm sata, so makes sense that it would dog so badly with my slow drives (one day I'll treat myself to a 10K rpm WD Raptor). Not much difference in Vista between 2 and 4 GB's (32 bit Vista Ultimate), but XP actually slows down with 4 GB's on board (only 3 GB's actually available in both Vista 32 bit and XP because my Geforce 8800 has 768MB of memory).

[shutterman]

Mike,

I have had similar results. No problems at all - been over two weeks. I also added an extra internal drive and it is up and running smoothly.

Even loaded Itunes (only to burn my itunes library to disc so I could import to Rhapsody so my media server would recognize the files! - 20 CD's later and I am through with Itunes)

thanks,
Wes