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4 days with Windows Vista

January 30th, 2007

We got our copy of Windows Vista at work the other day. So I decided to see just how well my Sun Ultra 20 M2 would run it. Needless to say, the Ultra 20 M2 only scored a 5.2 out of 10 on the Microsoft User Experience scale (it’s built in thingy).. That is pretty bad considering it has a Quadro FX 1500 Graphics Accelerator, 1 Dual-Core AMD Opteron – Model 1218, 2 GB of ram, and 2 x 250 GB SATA harddrives. It does run the Aero interface, but every time you open a window or any of those special effects happen it pegs the CPU at between 30 and 40%. Chris tried it on his Ultra 20 (original version), and it would only scored a 2.X and would not run the Aero interface. But now I am stuck with Vista on the machine (which also has Solaris 10 and XP on it) since Vista some how hosed my XP installation. So I will now list my complaints about it:

  1. Install took 3 reboots to install. You would think that since it is delivered on DVD, that it would only need 1 boot, and then you are done.
  2. Too many popup’s. Every time you download a program to install, or try to run something it constantly asks are you sure you want to run this?
  3. You can not set Firefox as the default browser. I tell Firefox every time it starts to make it the default browser, and as soon as you close it IE becomes the default again. I even changed it in the Default Program’s settings in Windows and it never sticks.
  4. During the Install it asks you to create an account, this account is automatically given Administrator rights still, and even with Admin rights it still keeps asking you all the questions.
  5. Before I changed the start menu to the classic mode, I clicked what I thought was the “shutdown” icon. The machine immediately went to sleep. It took me unplugging the power from the machine to get it to boot right again. I think this is how they are trying to say that Vista boots so fast, when it never really is booting just resuming from hibernate mode.
  6. The desktop icons are either freakishly huge or small and crappy, no real in between.
  7. The pop-ups, did I mention that already, I will get screen shots later, but they are so annoying
  8. The constant popping/fading of windows. Every time an application opens a new window it will pop and fade in/out. How annoying..
  9. Activation failed every time with some “DNS” error.. Ended up going in and clicking on the “Change Product Key” and typing the same product key in and it all of the sudden said it was activated.
  10. Control Panel is almost completely different, new names for old stuff
  11. Logging, take a look in the system log stuff and see all the stuff that it logs, install Office 2007 and see any more of what is logged.

Overall I am not impressed at all. If you put it besides Mac OS X, it is trying to mimic everything, but is so badly done that it requires a huge machine to run it on.

And if you did not see The Daily Show last night on Comedy Central, John Stewart was interviewing Bill Gates about Vista, it was a very funny interview and John kept trying to get Bill’s password out of him. Sorry Bill but this is one OS i will not be installing on my home PC.

(N.B. The version of Windows Vista I was using was the Enterprise Edition.)

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