Windows Vista
I spent some time this past weekend playing with Windows Vista. By playing, I mean I tried to install it on a couple machines. The first lucky recipient was my MacBook Pro. I attempted to install it as both a clean install and as Windows XP upgrade in Parallels (Build 1884 RC). No dice - I got a blue screen of death with both installs. It didn't even make it to the "copy files" phase. Next, I tried it on my Windows box. Rather than blow away Windows Media Center (the kids would kill me), I installed it in VMWare Server. Amazingly enough, it worked without any issues. While both VMWare and Parallels label their Vista support as "experimental", it seems that VMWare is doing a much better job. I wonder when VMWare is going to release their VMWare Server for the Mac?
After installing it, I discovered that Windows Media Center is included in Vista, so I'm guessing I could easily upgrade Windows Media Center w/o losing any functionality. I played around with the OS a bit and after about 10 minutes decided I liked the look of XP better and the look of OS X way better. It seemed very sluggish as well, but I'll attribute that to the 768 MB of RAM I gave it in VMWare. Will I upgrade? Probably, but at this point, I don't see a whole lot to get excited about (at least from an end-user perspective).
I rarely am required to work in Windows, after so many years with OS X full-time, but when I do it's a fun change and a completely new experience. That said, I miss my Mac only minutes later.
When Longhorn/Vista was first being discussed several years ago it appeared that this was going to be the operating system from Microsoft that was truly innovative and different. No longer.
They've dumbed it down so much and removed so many of the unique features and tools that it simply appears to just be XP all over again, with a few minor changes. That's really too bad, because they could have used the jumpstart. Microsoft has been stumbling around for the last, long while.
I doubt that Microsoft will get the wild adoption rate they were initially hoping for with Vista, given all of the reports and reviews that are sailing in as of late.
Posted by Geof Harries on September 27, 2006 at 07:48 PM MDT #
I find it interesting that you like the way XP looks better than Vista. To me Vista is far more polished and doesn't look like a kid's toy. The default look in XP is awful.
Also sounds to me like both you and Geof didn't use it all that much. I've been using it every day for almost all of my work and there are a lot of things in there that make it a nicer experience than XP. Little things are there like "open command prompt here" which has been available for XP for ages as a PowerToy but its there by default in Vista.
The search functionality thats built into the start menu is also nice..its like having a built-in app launcher. There are also "big-ticket" items like Aero but I'm more impressed with the small pieces.
I'd also argue that Geof is wrong and that they added tools. The bits that were removed probably weren't going to be much in the grand scheme of things (do I really care about WinFS? Not really). PowerShell was a bigger disappointment to me but thats available as an add-on for XP or Vista so it's not that big of a deal.
If I were you I'd give it another look if you can afford to when its running directly on good hardware vs. VMWare. OS X isn't a very good experience in VMWare either for the same reasons ;)
Jason
Posted by Jason Kratz on September 28, 2006 at 08:20 PM MDT #