So I took some of my free time this afternoon to shrink my XP partition and install Vista.

It seems to have alot of shiny shiny shiny stuff, but not a whole lot has changed. Everything is just shiny, and is more or less reorganized.

In my opinion all of the graphical extras seem pretty unnecessary, especially considering owners of some older hardware can barely run Vista.

The install was the best part so far, Vista is stored on it's DVD as a generic image, the install disk is really a PE disk with the image on it. This opens up a whole new swath of tools not available before vista, such as the ability to pop open a command window before installation. Also the vista installation PE has native support for commanding your disks. Pretty neat.

The security alerts ( Allow or Deny anyone? ) are kind of annoying, it boots up a bit slower than my XP install, but other than that it seems to perform about the same as XP so far. According to some reviews and benchmarks comparing XP to Vista you will lose a couple of FPS on most games, and many FPS on any OpenGL based games.

Driver support seems to be much better than the initial launch, everything installed smoothly and without error ( Except the part where I tried installing XP drivers by accident ).

I'll report back in on this next week after I throw a new RAID 5 array at it.

Until then have some shiny screen shots:

I tried out the beta on one of my other drives, did 32bit first then 64bit. The installation was pretty good how i remember, and i must say i do like the gui its pretty damn slick.

The reorganization of things makes it so you have to learn where almost everything is again, i actually didnt like some of the places they put things. So when i would try to go to something i'd have to look around a bit, i didnt spend much time on it so it could just be a day learning experience. Now what really blows is all the security shit, and trying to turn all that crap off, i managed too but still thought i coulda done more.

The OS as a whole is WAY bloated with bullshit, after a fresh install and poking around i went into task manager to notice 32+ fucking processes running, most of which i did not know wtf they were for and to, i could only guess that security crap. I'm running 18 processes at start up on XP. That and drivers not fully up to par, more optimizations to be made of the OS itself and drivers theres really no reason to run vista. Unless you like to deal with the issues it has. Hell back in the day it took me over a year to finally switch over to XP, cause it was bloated too. Windows 2000 for life.

The End.

One thing I have noticed about vista is that newer hardware that has come out since it's release are releasing 32 and 64 bit drivers in parallel. Which is nice.


I would say that it's about a 1 to 2 day learning curve. Having previously played around with Vista for a couple of hours before uninstalling it, and then installing it once again, I found my way around relatively easily.


Yeah the default amount of processes running is pretty ridiculous. I disabled the sidebar, as I found it completely useless.