One of the many things I planned for this site are various articles that I'd write on a wide variety of topics. Among the first will be a series of articles on Windows Vista from the eyes of a tech savvy consumer. My intent for these articles are to explain Windows Vista to the people that may be on the fence, or dead-set against it. I do not pretend to know everything, or be an expert on all things. Nor do I pretend to be an avid Microsoft fan; in fact, I'm rather against Microsoft when I can be. I only intend to express my views on various topics relating to Windows Vista as an early adopter. In this first post, I intend to focus on my general experience, and touch on topics that I will devote whole, specific articles to.
Before I continue any further, I should probably give details on the system I use. I do use a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501. I run a dual-core AMD Turion 64x2 TL-56 processor running at 1.8 GHz. I have installed 1 GB of DDR2-533 memory, shared with my integrated ATI xPress 1150 chipset, leaving me 864 MB for system use. I have a 120 GB 2.5" SATA150 hard drive. I also have a 15.4" Widescreen display with TrueLife technology. Dual layer DVD burner that runs at speeds I cannot recall at the moment. For all intents and purposes, this is a more powerful system in portable form than my present desktop unit, save for the graphics unit. However, I'm not writing this post about my systems, I'm writing it about Windows Vista, so I'll give you a brief history of my interactions, and OS installations next.
I have had experience using many various operating systems, ranging from Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 to Linux and Windows Vista. My first computer ran the original Windows 95, what we know as Version A. My experience on Windows 95 OSR-2 and OSR-2.5 (collectively known as Version B and Version C) is limited as they were both OEM installations. My windows experience took a new turn with the introduction of Windows 98. This was the first operating system that I had actually purchased for myself, preordered it at Staples. I even stuck around and purchased a copy of our brain-dead Windows ME, though I got the $40 version that only upgraded off of Windows 98. After some months using Windows ME, I encountered a problem that pushed me over to my first NT-based OS experience.
Windows 2000 was a new experience for me, given my departure from a DOS-based Windows 9x kernel. Needless to say, it was quite a pleasant experience, despite the occasional malfunctioning game. Windows 2000 is not a gaming system, but with, what I believe was SP2, and the addition of compatibility modes, it got better. Of course, by this point, XP had been announced, and I had been riding around waiting for its release. Out of all the Windows releases, I have the most experience with Windows XP, and it also gave me the first experience on holding out for a new release, that being SP2. Though, once I upgraded to SP2, everything changed, and I'm happy to be using it. This brings me to my Windows Vista experiences, but I've one other mention before then.
I have experience in Linux as well. My history with Linux is much more comprehensive than Windows, so I won't get into so much here. What you need to know is that I've used a wide variety of distributions: RedHat, Mandrake (now Madriva), Corel, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Slackware. Of them all, I've been favoring Ubuntu recently. I'm an experimenter, so I play with them a lot. I may do an article series on Linux, but I'll settle for a few comparisons.
As you can see, I'm one to lean on the bleeding edge of software. I downloaded copies of Windows Vista RC2 even. So I've been dabbling with it on and off now. Of all things though, this post is getting a little long, I think, and I want to wrap up with something useful.
My current installation of Windows Vista is the Business edition running on my laptop, named Misaki. I'll get into the naming of my systems some other time, but she runs it great. When I purchased her, I did it with Dell's Express Upgrade option. Ultimately, my copy of Windows Vista cost me $10 shipping costs. The unfortunate aspect, however, to my situation is that it is an upgrade-based installation, the violation of the most sacred of OS installation taboos. You just never install an OS as an upgrade, always perform a clean install. My hook was on account of the shear amount of information I had on the drive, and nowhere to back it up. Though, thanks to my present number of drives, and backup media, I may end up doing a wipe and reinstall.
What I'm going to wrap up this pilot with are my initial experiences, and the possible roadmap for future articles. I'm quite happy with Vista as I'm a functionality person, and like eye-candy. Yes, I said eye-candy, which means I am running the Aero interface. One of the first things I do after a Vista installation, which is quite easy in the professional series (Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate), but a rather more "advanced" process in the home series (Home Basic and Home Premium), is to disable User Account Control (UAC). User Account Control is analogous to the sudo function in Linux. It allows you to run processes in administrative mode. The need for this comes as Windows Vista is the first Windows OS to migrate the users to Limited-Rights after installation. This is good in theory, and is implemented well in Linux, however, it's poor in Vista's implementation. Under Linux, sudo has an effective timeout of 15 minutes. This allows one to enter a command using it, and only have to enter the password once every 15 minutes. This even extends to the graphical versions like gksu, kdesu, gksudo, and kdesudo. Vista's implementation of UAC, which is a user-rights elevation technology, is likely the poorest example today, however, I won't be getting into all the details this time.
Despite UAC's poor implementation, there are features whose good balance out the bad of UAC. Aero's interface is clean, beautiful, and impressive. The redesign of many of the control panel elements into XML/Web-based technologies gives them a more extensible, user-friendly appearance. Windows Vista's firewall is an upgrade upon XP's firewall, as it does inbound and outbound blocking. The Windows Sidebar is Vista's attempt towards a widget-based technology much like Yahoo! Widgets (once Konfabulator), and OSX's Dashboard. Windows Flip 3D is an Aero-based task switcher that gives a full, skewed, 3D view of each open window. Let me just say it's pretty cool.
Among all the features of Windows Vista, there are goods and bads. Among the versions of Vista, there are goods and bads. I've listed several of the good ones, and a few of them will be topics in future articles; however, for the time being, I think I'll just take this a post at a time. I may not have swayed people yet; I probably even forgot some other features of Windows Vista, but things will happen as they happen. Until next time, I'll be planning what to do next, and playing with Vista.
