Pantsland

I took the plunge yesterday and installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my notebook, and overall I am relatively impressed. I have had the betas sitting around for some time, but never installed them. My notebook is my full-time work and pleasure computer, so I did not take this move lightly. I am not going to write a massive review, there is plenty of that around the internet, but I will note down my impressions so far.

Pros

• The new effects are nice, and not too intrusive.
• I completely agree with Greg Hughes, everything does run considerably faster. I have been having performance issues with Outlook 2007 since the betas, but finally it runs at a normal speed. Unlike Greg, I do run Aero Glass.
• The Sidebar is nice, but see below in the cons section for my issues with it.
• Flip 3D is mainly eye candy, but I like it.
• The updated user security model is welcome, and even being a power user, I think I will still get some benefit out of it. The administrator authorization boxes are very intrusive though, blacking out everything on the screen but the dialog box.
• While Vista seems to take longer to start up, it resumes from sleep and hibernate much faster than XP.

Cons

• I am not convinced about the Aero Glass look. It is nice, but the way window title bars go black when they are maximized doesn’t sit well with me.
• Windows Media Player is ugly, ugly, ugly with Aero Glass. Way too much transparency.
• While it is nice, I feel the Sidebar could have been better implemented. I am a fan of sidebars, but the one included with Windows Vista can look quite messy, as sometimes gadgets don’t seem to line up well. I also hate that you can’t resize gadgets or the Sidebar itself. I’ll be running with it for a few days, but I am not sure if it will be a permanent fixture. I used an application called Desktop Sidebar some time ago, and it was a much better solution.
• I cannot for the life of me work out how to undock toolbars from the taskbar. I used to run with a toolbar docked to the side of my screen with the quick launch bar and my desktop icons in it, but I now can’t do that.

I will probably add to this list over the coming days as I discover new things that I like and that annoy me. The above is not a comprehensive list of all the pros of Vista, just the things that make me say ‘hmm, that’s nice.’

Driver support has so far been quite good. The only problems I had were with my notebook’s built in camera and the 3.5mm sound jack not working, but a quick visit to the HP site to download different drivers fixed both problems.