About 6 months ago I told myself I was no longer a PC guy after running off a Dell laptop for a short time. I decided I would make a deal with myself and say that my next big investment would go towards a pretty shiny Mac. At the same time I also had my mind set on a dual screen setup so three weeks later I received two big boxes in the mail from Newegg which held my two new shiny monitors, but as you can see from the picture only one is turned on — and that's where the Vista story begins.
I couldn't wait to plug my new monitors in as I stood there staring at the two large boxes which each contained a Sceptre 19inch Flatscreen Widescreen monitor. My mother could see the excitement in my eyes as I smoothly untapped and unwrapped the protected wrapping. My brother claims I unwrap my computer parts in a clean and nice manor, like award winning nice.
As I moved on to plug them in when I noticed that the back of my Dell laptop was not a DVI-D, but it was a DVI-I! Arrr, this threw everything off! Best Buy, Circuit City, and not even Wal-Mart had the converter I needed to allow me to plug both of my monitors into the back of my laptop. This made me mad so I ended up doing what I had to do and that was buy a new PC just so I could get my new monitors to work.
The decision.
As I looked at the Newegg site for computer parts I wanted a PC that would run Vista because I wanted to try it out and see what it was like. I had heard nothing but bad things about it, but with me being the eye candy lover I am, I just knew I would love Vista.
Standing and looking at the features for each edition of Vista I knew I wouldn't settle for anything less than everything. The Home Basic didn't even come with the Aero theme for goodness sakes — what is Microsoft thinking? Home Basic comes with Networking (Oh, it better come with networking!), easy search (Ha, good feature, I feel so special to have easy search in this edition), and IE7 (I had this in XP, whooptydo). The next two editions, the premium and business, are reasonable for which features they come with but it wasn't everything so I went with Ultimate.
The experience.
Booting up into the Windows Installer and seeing an GUI instead of a bright blue screen made me get goose bumps and chills. The installer ran for about 15 minutes before finishing and transferring me to boot up Windows for the first time. Even though my drivers were not installed and the graphics were horribly rendered and by default my resolution was as low as 800x600, it still aww'ed me though. I popped in my Motherboard CD to find that the .exe spit an error message at me.
"The installer does not support Windows 98 or 2000."
Well, that's nice because I am on Vista, not 98...nor Dos, nor 3.1...I am on Vista, Vista Ultimate! The thing that is even sadder is that my box has a nice sticker that suggested that my hardware be used on Vista. Up until this point I began to worry, but luckily Vista had generic drivers installed for my network card and I was able to hop on the internet right away and begin downloading upgraded drivers for my hardware. But, as soon as all my drivers were up and running the GUI became all pretty and my new monitors complimented things very nicely.
What I liked.
After using Windows Vista for a week I am glad to say that I love every moment of it, The new login screen, the new sounds, the transparency, the icons, and most of all the neat effects.
What I could get use to.
There are a few things I haven't found out how to do yet in Vista that I could do in XP, but it's no big deal as of now. I haven’t figured out how to 'Change the way users log on and off'. Another thing that bothers me is that they split each tab in the Desktop Properties up into their own dialog box so things are not just one click away. I think they did this to fill up the 'Personalize' dialog box because it's truly less usable than it was.
I have only ran across two programs that do not support Windows Vista as well as they should. Adobe Acrobat and Limewire. Limewire works but it's not compatible with the Aero theme, so to use it you are automatically converted to the standard windows theme until you are done. Adobe Acrobat works as well, but you have to tweak the installer a bit before being able to install it.
Two small things that I either got use to quick or fixed quick was the default text and the default mouse cursor for Aero. I had to switch to the XP mouse because I am just too use to it.
All in all.
All in all, Windows Vista has been a great experience and I believe that it has helped me become more productive (that or my new monitors, ha!). If you love eye candy then you'll love Vista.
So, when will I become a Mac guy now? Who knows, but for now Vista is my primary OS.
Update: If you properly install your drivers, vista runs Counter-Strike: Source like a charm, so I am sure other games will run just fine since Counter-Strike: Source is one of the most demanding games graphically right now.
Until next time, follow me on twitter, @michaeldick