As one of the benefit of participating ImagineCup Web Development Competition, I was entitled to download the free Windows Vista off the web, coming with an appropriate license. With an adequately good Video Card and a 1.5G of DDR memory, it barely meets the minimum requirement running Vista. Here are a little feelings I’ve got during the first few days of use.

Compatibility

I recall the Vista was built from ground-up over the last four years by the team. But it does provide sufficient backward compatibility that many programs running on XP can successfully run on Vista without an upgrade. In fact, when Vista gets an installation request from a program that has known incompatibility issues, it will give you a warning. My bloody experience told me that, don’t take it as a joke. It’s really going to mess it up.

I was installing Nero Essential 7 on the Vista before I get a message saying that I better upgrade before continue. But I wanted to risk it. So I pressed continue, after which the installation halted and it took me about 2 hours to figure out how to back out the halted installation. Fortunately the Nero.com has a cleaner that was designed to remove such zombie installation from the OS, but seems like the tool only works when I sign in as “Administrator”. (i.e. I must be using the Administrator account, not another account that is also an administrator).

But the whole process is overwhelmingly complex for any non-professionals I believe. Vista system recovery staff might be an emerging career. (hehehe…just joking).

Performance

Like 4 years ago, when I first installed Windows XP on my Pentium 2, although better than that, the vista gives me the feeling that it’s occupying all of my machine’s resources. Occupying 500-600 M of physically memory by itself, I really feel sorry for the 1G memory I bought during last Christmas, for it being “abused” by Windows and couldn’t devote itself to other “projects”.

When the CPU gauge stays stable, (on startup, it freezes at 100% for quite a while and eventually becomes normal), I tried to open some large programs and count the seconds they take to open. The speed, in fact, is acceptable. But I didn’t test operating them. I bet those memory intense ones would suffer since there is less “pizza” left for them.

…Vista is ready to be an ultimate platform for the Internet centric world…

Hardware Support

The hardware support looks to perform better than Windows XP. It recognizes my graphics card and installed it properly. But after I manually re-installed the driver so the nVidia control center can be accessed from display dialog, Vista detected my hardware change and automatically shut my Aero theme on next start up, until I found the cause and upgraded the driver again.

General User Experience

I would keep saying “where is my stuff” for the first 10 hours using it. Every common task in XP is now separated into one or more drill-down levels. There is always a list of common tasks comes first as oppose to advanced settings which can usually be found on the left side bar of the window. I found the advanced options are more clear to me as they retain a similar organization as they were in XP.

Another concern I found was the file moving and deletion. It was extremely slow. I guess it has things to do with updating the windows file indexing feature. Although not really clear if there is such a thing, I am guessing that Vista is keeping track of all the folders and files in it to optimize searching of files. So each file moving and deletion operation will affect the structure of the index file, if it works similarly like the ones in a database system. The consequence of this can be severe and even catastrophic. “If user can’t even get the very basic tasks done efficiently”, what’s the point of having everything else?

Final Notes

Like I always believed, the value of Vista is not Vista itself, but the .NET framework 3.0 bundled in the back scene. With that strategy, Vista is ready to be an ultimate platform for the Internet centric world, and could potentially beat Linux and Unix like it did decades ago with its Text Editor.