My experience with Vista

I've heard a lot of people complain about having issues with Vista. I've even heard some things I can only assume are made up as I had no issue at all with it: that you had to buy an addition to Vista to be able to play games. That was not the case for me or anyone I know.

I had only one problem with Vista, that was related to a very dated router I have. The problem simply didn't exist with a newer router. I should mention I've never dealt with a retail copy of Vista, all my experience are from the RC1 and RC2(builds 5600 and 5744 respectively).

I have a rather old system comparitavely. I'm running :

AMD64 3000+ on a K8 Combo-Z ASRock

1GB DDR 400 RAM

GeForce 6600 w/256MB 8x AGP video card

SATA 120GB HD

So as you see, my hardware is a little old, I didn't have any driver issues really. The Realtek sound driver that was packaged with RC1 didn't work, however at the time I installed Vista, they already had an updated functional driver.

As soon as I got the newly installed Vista I started playing around with the installation, and with my software. Oh yeah, I ran the x64 version of Vista. It has/had no support for the AIO printer I own, nor the digicam I have.

Every software package I downloaded or own worked fine right out of the box/install. It may be fixed now, but I spoke in haste, at the time, the then current version of Adobe Reader™ v8 wouldn't install with the installer. I used a work-around I stumbled on. When the error message came up, you could go in the hidden files in LocalLow and pull the extracted install out of the temp and move it, so that when you clicked the "OK" button on the error message, you didn't lose the data. It installed fine from the new location.

I really enjoyed the new filing system for users. I didn't like the UAC(User Account Controls), it was one of the first things I disabled. I suppose they might be useful for multiple user computers, however, I'm the only operator of mine.

I liked the obsenely resource intensive graphics in the Aero theme. I found everything to run smoothly and overall faster than I could achieve on XP. Another thing should be noted at this point, I don't run any weird convoluted setups so that may contribute to my lack of issues. I didn't download any new drivers, I used what came with the OS or via the Update feature. I found Windows Mail to be a vast improvement in my opinion to Outlook Express, though I must admit I installed Office 2003 Pro within a couple days.

I had no issues with IE7+ though I know of several people who did. I did learn the hard way that by default any disc burning is set to "Live" rather than a "closed" session disc, which is fine if you only intend to read the discs in a Windows Vista™ environment.

All the software I have gave me no issues actually running it. I didn't even have problems with Neverwinter Nights or any other OpenGL games, that was a complaint I often heard though, mainly among people who were using an ATI™ branded video card. I really enjoyed the games that came with Vista™. In the RC versions, I was using Vista Ultimate, though after comparing the features, I'd have been totally content with Home Premium.

I tried out the Media Center Edition application that comes with Ultimate edition and found that I have absolutely no use for it haha. Oh yeah, there was an issue with playing DVDs in Windows Media Player 11, I am not sure if it's ever been resolved as my DVD burner no longer reads DVDs to test it. Off subject I suppose, but the DUW-1608ARR made by AOPEN failed to read DVDs after using their software for a firmware update. I find it very confusing even now as it was fine for a long time after the update, all research I did into the subject showed me that I was far from the only one to have that issue, thankfully it's totally unrelated to Vista(a note here, the firmware updates do not work in the x64 build of Vista.)

When it got close to the end of the trial period for RC2(a month ahead of time specifically) it started to notify me at random times to back up all my data for the expiration of the trial. I thought I'd be locked out at the end, I was wrong. It switched to an anoying restart every two hours, however I could run everything like normal for the two hour active period.

Vista claims to use DirectX10, and that may be true in the retail release, I'm not sure. Most software erronously reported the use of DX10, which my hardware supports in case you were wondering, however upon closer inspection, it was actually running an unreleased version DX9.0L. I'm not really aware of the differences though I'm sure there must be some.

Overall I'd have to say my experience with Vista was quite enjoyable, I was sad when my trial ended and I didn't have the money for a retail copy.