So there it is, I have a functional drive installed in this system with Windows Vista on it. I am not, unfortunately, using it at this moment as several somewhat enigmatic errors forced me to ‘run home’ to Windows XP. My initial thoughts on Vista?
I love that Operating System!
Having used it full time for 6 hours or so I can tell you that it already feels better than XP does in many ways. It simply kicks ass. Here are the programs that I have installed.
- Office 2003 Pro
- Project 2003
- Visio 2003
- OneNote 2003
- FrontPage 2003
- ClearContext 2 Beta
The above seem to have no problems.
- Visual Studio 2005 Professional – installed and ran but needed to be set to disable Aero (display compositing) and fails when building a web project though a windows form application operates correctly.
General observations:
- The security improvements are going to be fantastic
- The network stack feels a lot faster… my download speeds were good
- The improvements to the Start menu are good
- The per-application volume / sound controls are good
- Aero looks amazing
- Overall usability improvements are good, this is especially noticeable in the Windows Explorer
- Many things ran fine as a “standard user”, some of the older Windows apps needed me to be an admin user – but they still needed permission to “use” the admin powers
In specific, it was interesting that for some things if I ran a program “as administrator” when I was not on an administrator account it ran not only with administrator privileges but within the context of the administrator. Thus, if the installation program made a change to a user profile item, the change was not made to my account. If I was an admin, then while it asked permission for the upgraded privileges it ran within my context.
For now, I am back in XP because I need Visual Studio working. I will keep going over the next few days / weeks to see if I can solve those problems.