Windows Vista Experimentation Continued

Windows Vista is still not ready for primetime. It is however, an interesting new Windows, and it does have some interesting features of merit. In my last column, I gave a few first impressions of the Operating System, the most aggravating of which was its slowness; however, I suspected that the new Aero interface, which relies heavily on advanced graphics capabilities of the higher end video graphics cards, was in fact the culprit in making my system seem slow. The Aero interface is really just a bit of flashiness, making windows appear translucent over the background picture. With just a basic graphics adapter, however, it just sucks the life out of the processor, and every task becomes an agonizing chore. Fortunately, it is easy to turn off, and once I switched to the “Windows Classic” theme, the OS became much faster. With more RAM, which is planned, I am sure the speed will become quite respectable.

When Vista is officially launched, it will be offered in five different flavors; Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate. The pre-release beta version offered by Microsoft is the Vista Ultimate, which has all features of each of the others wrapped up into one, including Windows Media Centre. Microsoft has changed the way it sells its various versions; for example if you start with Windows Home Basic, and then decide that you want to upgrade to Vista Business, you can use your credit card and download the upgrade from the web. This really makes a lot of sense, and allows users to continually upgrade until they have the feature set they want, without losing their original investment.

The computer with which I am experimenting with has an AMD Athlon 64 processor, which is a 64 bit CPU, and Windows Vista is the first 64 bit operating system I have experienced. I was hoping for increased speed and stability, but I was disappointed. I guess it’s a matter of waiting for some 64 bit applications to come to market. I was impressed by the speed of MS Office XP, which was slow to install and crashed the system on the first install attempt– a crash so severe that I got the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death); there is no recovering from this type of crash without turning off the computer completely and starting again. Once I got Office successfully installed, it runs noticeably faster than it does on Windows XP, despite the fact that this version of Office is only a 32 bit application.

Probably the most exciting feature, from my own personal standpoint, is a new bundled program called Windows Photo Gallery. This is so superior to the previous Windows Explorer photo feature-set, the old system seems almost annoying by comparison. I have been using Google’s Picasa photo organizing software, and it looks like Microsoft has been paying attention. Photo Gallery looks like a copy of Picasa, but with more and better features. Now you can tag all your photos with categories you devise for yourself; for example, you could have your photos organized by labels such as Friends, Mountain Scenes, Parties, Holidays, Children, Pets etc. You can also tag all your photos with a one-to-five star rating system. Then it’s a simple matter to look up your photos by whichever category you choose, saving much time if you have a lot of photos.

One thing I was very glad to see was the inclusion of Remote Desktop in Vista Ultimate, though it wasn’t a real surprise. Remote Desktop is still the fastest, best remote control method I have ever used, and it works great with Vista.

The next step for me is to load Simply Accounting and begin using Vista as my daily workspace. Stay tuned for more discoveries as I learn more about this exciting new OS.