Vista, first impressions
Ξ February 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ IT |
So, I spent my day off doing a clean install of Vista onto my laptop. It had been getting pretty crufted up and in need of a re-install, but I held off because I knew my MS Action Pack subscription containing Vista was coming in soon.
Initial impressions are they just slapped a nice shiny coat of new on it for newness sake. Ya it looks a bit better, but I’d say it’s less than the NT to 2K upgrade, maybe even less than 2k to XP. Everything has a failing idiot friendly feel to it. To do anything, you get piles of windows and popups to slog through. More and more barriers are thrown up to actually administer and maintain the system.
They re-organized most of the filesystem, but left shortcuts scattered all over pointing from the old location to the new ones. It has a very kluge feel to it. To top it all of, users don’t even have permissions to good chunks of the filesystem, such as not being able to click on shortcuts to wherever they hid the new start menu folders.
Major problems and compatibility issues
- Nvidia drivers suck. UT 2004 works, I can barely run Half-Life, & I’m afraid to try and run any more recent games.
- The built in audio drivers work, but suck for gaming. I was missing half the sounds in Counter Strike the other night. Not a huge deal, as because sound had been working, I neglected to install the latest drivers from Dell.
- TrueCrypt actually works… kind of. Officially they say it doesn’t. However I’ve used it to read/write to an encrypted volume. The problem occurs when you try and dismount the volume, the system bluescreens (including when shutting down or rebooting).
I’ll probably keep it installed and push forward. Whether or not it’s actually better, we’ll all end up running it eventually.