Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Pheer My Leet OS

ShrinkydinkedVista

There was a brief window of opportunity (window! har har! I kill me) to download a beta test of the new Vista OS, so, since I was screening documentaries and films last night and would have plenty of time, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First impressions are fairly good. The install was relatively painless. The only big issue was that it didn't like the Norton Utilities I had and asked to uninstall them, which took a long time. Other than that, I was able to keep all of my programs installed and so far, they've all worked just peachy. In fact, Firefox seems much more peppy than it ever did under XP. I'm not sure what that's all about, but I welcome it.

I'm also beta testing the new Office suite, and all of those programs work much faster under Vista. All in all, things move along quite quickly, and this is on a laptop, not a big desktop brimming with high-tech digital goodness.

I think what I like most so far is the customization of Windows Explorer. You can change a lot there - how you see files, sorting and how you navigate folders and such. Very nice. The graphics do look nice too, although the flipdy-dip window thingie that I screenshot isn't particularly needed, even if it is kinda cute. The Gadget/Widget things are completely unnecessary too, but again, kinda cute.

Negatives - I did have one lockup after class. I closed the laptop after the slideshow, and maybe because I didn't unplug the projector first it wasn't happy. I've plugged and unplugged a scad of peripherals other than that, though, and no worries yet.

I let you know if it blows up or anything

2 comments:

sheepish said...

What are your system specs? Proc and RAM, that is? I've heard it takes a lot of juice, so I'm surprised to hear you say it was peppier.

Overread said...

I'm running a HP Pavilion zv6000, which is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (or at least that's what it says on the My Computer window. I've got 1 GB RAM. So far, so good. It even auto-detected a particularly picky network printer.