Rant()
Sub (Begin Rant)
Well, I waited this one out, till all the major bugs were worked out of Vista. I just downloaded the release version a few days ago from Microsoft's site (Trial good till July 2007)
I replaced my Main Hard Drive with another, and thats where all went terribly bad.
Let me say, I can't believe they are letting this go to market like this! First off, the install took like 3 hours! (Even the install screen stated this can take several hours to complete)
Secondly after it was FINALLY installed, one error after another.... and another.
I guess I should start by saying my hardware has all been purchased in the past year, and all "standard" stuff. P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 Gig's Memory, GEforce 6600 256 Meg Gfx card, and a Sound Blaster Live. One would think that such standard hardware would be supported.
The first error was this lovely one soon as the desktop appeared for the first time:
I wanted to call Microsoft and ask for the the phone number for the "Unidentified Device Manufacturer"!
The next thing right after that was that it could not use the Vista color scheme, because ONE program on my system (Trillian) was keeping it from doing so!
Those two things aside, Going into Device manager, pops up a dialog asking if that is what I wanted to do, well I clicked on the icon didn't I? I heard about all the security pop-up's, but it is more ridiculous than I could have ever imagined! Just about anything you try to do, causes a pop-up confirmation, with no "Do not show this again" anywhere in sight.
Lastly, nothing on my computer seemed to be supported by Vista, My APC Finger print reader, NeoSpeech Voices, Nero Burning Rom ect... Using sound recorder, I was able to record my speech, and play it back, but when trying to go into the speech recognition settings it said no supported hardware was available. All of my stardock stuff wouldn't work. AVG anti virus wouldn't work. I then went into Text To speech to see what the new voices sounded like, and when I would click "Preview Voice" it would come up with an error that no audio playback device was detected. Thats funny because all the system sounds were working, and even tried an MP3 that worked fine. (This after installing the "Vista Drivers" from Creative)
I have a 26" LCD monitor, and even with the latest "Vista drivers" for this card. dirrectly from Nvidia, I could not get above 1280 x 1024 resolution. (In XP I have it set to 1920 X 1080, and is capable of 2048 X 1536).
Media center does look nice, but it kept crashing, and flickering in and out, acting like an old VGA cable that has gone bad. (I'm using a DVI cable)
Next I tried changing the icons to 64 x 64 through display settings/advanced, and they only changed spacing, and not the actual size of the icons. (Even after a reboot) Then I right clicked and saw "Show large Icons" and tried that. It changed all the system icons to large, but left 3rd party icons the original size! Kinda looks funky with some large icons, and some really small ones all mixed in together!
When I downloaded and installed Firefox, and ran it I got the Typical "This is not your default browser" dialog, and made it such. The next time I ran FireFox, the pop up appeared again, Looks like MS is again insisting on keeping IE the default browser again!!!!
Ok, I think you get that this was a TOTALLY frustrating experience! I had Vista on the computer for less than 4 hours (Only an hour more than it took to install). I powered down, and put my XP drive back in the system.
I had really been looking forward to Vista for quite some time now, as it really does LOOK more polished and clean (Thanks to Apple for the ideas!) and couldn't wait to start using it. So I am by no means a simple nay-sayer here, as I REALLY was looking forward to it!
I am a power user / programmer / IT guy myself. I can't even begin to imagine someone with minimal computer skills trying to work through all this. It makes me feel sorry for the IT guys when their NON IT executives decide to switch to Vista!
This has just been MY personal experience, and could be just my system (HIGHLY unlikely... but REMOTELY possible I guess). If anything, it's a bit of a heads up to switch wisely, and not install on your main system by any means to check it out.
End Sub
Sub (Begin Rant)
Well, I waited this one out, till all the major bugs were worked out of Vista. I just downloaded the release version a few days ago from Microsoft's site (Trial good till July 2007)
I replaced my Main Hard Drive with another, and thats where all went terribly bad.
Let me say, I can't believe they are letting this go to market like this! First off, the install took like 3 hours! (Even the install screen stated this can take several hours to complete)
Secondly after it was FINALLY installed, one error after another.... and another.
I guess I should start by saying my hardware has all been purchased in the past year, and all "standard" stuff. P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 Gig's Memory, GEforce 6600 256 Meg Gfx card, and a Sound Blaster Live. One would think that such standard hardware would be supported.
The first error was this lovely one soon as the desktop appeared for the first time:

I wanted to call Microsoft and ask for the the phone number for the "Unidentified Device Manufacturer"!
The next thing right after that was that it could not use the Vista color scheme, because ONE program on my system (Trillian) was keeping it from doing so!

Those two things aside, Going into Device manager, pops up a dialog asking if that is what I wanted to do, well I clicked on the icon didn't I? I heard about all the security pop-up's, but it is more ridiculous than I could have ever imagined! Just about anything you try to do, causes a pop-up confirmation, with no "Do not show this again" anywhere in sight.
Lastly, nothing on my computer seemed to be supported by Vista, My APC Finger print reader, NeoSpeech Voices, Nero Burning Rom ect... Using sound recorder, I was able to record my speech, and play it back, but when trying to go into the speech recognition settings it said no supported hardware was available. All of my stardock stuff wouldn't work. AVG anti virus wouldn't work. I then went into Text To speech to see what the new voices sounded like, and when I would click "Preview Voice" it would come up with an error that no audio playback device was detected. Thats funny because all the system sounds were working, and even tried an MP3 that worked fine. (This after installing the "Vista Drivers" from Creative)
I have a 26" LCD monitor, and even with the latest "Vista drivers" for this card. dirrectly from Nvidia, I could not get above 1280 x 1024 resolution. (In XP I have it set to 1920 X 1080, and is capable of 2048 X 1536).
Media center does look nice, but it kept crashing, and flickering in and out, acting like an old VGA cable that has gone bad. (I'm using a DVI cable)
Next I tried changing the icons to 64 x 64 through display settings/advanced, and they only changed spacing, and not the actual size of the icons. (Even after a reboot) Then I right clicked and saw "Show large Icons" and tried that. It changed all the system icons to large, but left 3rd party icons the original size! Kinda looks funky with some large icons, and some really small ones all mixed in together!
When I downloaded and installed Firefox, and ran it I got the Typical "This is not your default browser" dialog, and made it such. The next time I ran FireFox, the pop up appeared again, Looks like MS is again insisting on keeping IE the default browser again!!!!
Ok, I think you get that this was a TOTALLY frustrating experience! I had Vista on the computer for less than 4 hours (Only an hour more than it took to install). I powered down, and put my XP drive back in the system.
I had really been looking forward to Vista for quite some time now, as it really does LOOK more polished and clean (Thanks to Apple for the ideas!) and couldn't wait to start using it. So I am by no means a simple nay-sayer here, as I REALLY was looking forward to it!
I am a power user / programmer / IT guy myself. I can't even begin to imagine someone with minimal computer skills trying to work through all this. It makes me feel sorry for the IT guys when their NON IT executives decide to switch to Vista!
This has just been MY personal experience, and could be just my system (HIGHLY unlikely... but REMOTELY possible I guess). If anything, it's a bit of a heads up to switch wisely, and not install on your main system by any means to check it out.
End Sub