Rob's Blog

Vista
25th Jun 2007 10:06

So, I've been rather bold and replaced the main Fuelled on Coffee office machine. For a few moments I considered replacing it with a very large coffee machine and a pad of paper, but common sense prevailed so I had the chaps over at Overclockers put together a nice AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600 2.80GHz Dual Core CPU system centred around an NVIDIA 8800 GTS DirectX 10 Graphics Card. He's called Vince, and he's hard as nails.Vista Premium is pretty sweet. Good points:

• It looks gorgeous. XP on my laptop just looks so 'flat' now.
• It runs my standard suite of applications with no problems at all (Notepad++, Firefox, F-Secure 2007, StrokeIt, OpenOffice, PhotoshopCS3 and the BrowserPool VNC client, WinSCP, Putty, Paegent...).
• The whole permissions system is very much more Linux orientated and I like it!
• It has a lot of 'little things' which make it a lot nicer to use, for example; pressing F2 to rename a file in explorer it doesn't highlight the file extension. Running 2 monitors you can have your wallpaper stretch the full width. You can change a username after creating it. The search bar in the start menu is unbelievably usable. They're all tiny little things, but they add up.
• The sidebar gadgets are nice. Did I mention it looks gorgeous?
• I stuck my Firewire card in and it had no problems detecting it. Setting up file sharing on the network was really easy.

At the end of the day, its not really very different to XP. It's certainly not as different as I expected it to be. So – so far. Vista gets a very surprising thumbs up.