My god, an actual technical post. (Run! Run for your lives!)

Windows Vista: First Impressions

Yes, yes, I know: everyone and their Luddite mother is blogging about their first impressions of Vista. I never professed to be that original. But here are my impressions thus far:

Technical background - I have Vista running on two boxes at the moment:

• Compaq Presario 6000, roughly 3 years old, with 2GB of RAM and a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 processor. This box scores a 1.0 on the "Experience Gauge" thingie because it's got a lousy video card, and I like the shiny so much (as you will soon see) that I'll probably drop $70 on one at crucial.com before the week is out.
• Dell Dimension C521, brand new, with an Athlon 64-bit dual-core, 4GB of RAM and all sorts of shiny video and sound.

Installation: both went about as painlessly as could be expected - there are one or two exclamation points in Device Manager on the older Presario, but nothing that seems to be affecting the performance of the machine.

Performance: well, I fibbed a bit up there. The Presario?  Well, it actually had 512MB of RAM when I first installed Vista on it. Oh my god, I wished I were dead:

*double-click on icon*

*sigh loudly*

*pour a glass of iced tea from the fridge*

*return to office chair*

*repeat*

So $200 from crucial.com later, the box is maxxed out at 2GB of RAM and is moving along just fine. I think that my party line for customers is going to be something along the lines of "Don't install Vista on less than 1.5GB", and the only reason I won't say "2" in that sentence will be to avoid getting laughed out of the room or thrown off of the roof by my more budget-conscious listeners.

Aero/Glass/Whatever: Okay, I'll admit it. I was prepared to be all cynical and say "yeah, whatever, I don't care." But...man, it's really shiny. From a purely practical standpoint, I can see the new-and-improved Alt-TAB making me at least incrementally more productive on the multi-tasking front, ditto for the "Hover over the taskbar and get a little preview pane" function. (That one not as much, though, as I tend to navigate with the keyboard as much as possible.) The sideways CTRL-WindowsKey-Tab thingy? Oh yes, very very shiny. Here's what it needs to do in order to turn a Vista keystroke into a killer app:

Create an option so that the windows will scroll on their own, say at 10-second intervals, and convince applications like installers and the various MMC consoles¹ to update themselves real-time whilst in sideways-flippy mode.

And you do that for me? I load Vista on my admin workstation, install a second monitor, and leave all of my monitoring tools on perpetual sideways-flippy².

Anyway, more later my devoted readers. (You know, all two of you.)  My 64-bit Vista is blue-screening like crazy, probably because I tried to load something (*cough* SimCity *cough*) on it to see how it looked in the new shiny. I want to grab some screen-shots of the network setup process anyway, so I'll just blow it out and reload whilst I'm writing from Vista box #2.

[1] I'm so very not happy about things like MOM/ESM/Virtual Server/VirtualPC/SQL/etc. not quite working well (or at all) under Vista yet. I'm not saying that the QA process for Vista wasn't a big enough job on its own, but these aren't exactly "Joe-Bob's teeny tiny application" that we're talking about here.

[2] I bet you'll be able to clock with an egg-timer the amount of time it takes someone to say "You dolt, you can already do that, just flip this bit in the Registry. (Not to mention people correcting me as to the proper terminology for "sideways-flippy" mode. Though whatever it is, I'm sure I'll like my word better.)