Windows Vista

I’ve got it

Anyway, this morning I didn’t even know it was released. I’d seen a post on the eBuyer forums about it being available to reserver from the 27th of Jan, so was plannign to get it then. But I was looking round to see what prices were like elsewhere, and found this, I was about to order it online, but then noticed the address:

Overclockers UK – Unit 40 Imex Business Park – Fenton – Stoke-on-Trent – Staffordshire – ST4 3NP – Tel: 0870 443 0880

Now, that’s about 1/2 an hour away from me, so this afternoon i went to buy it, got a nice (non) shiny OEM package with Microsoft’s T’s & C’s on one side, and information about it on the other. Open it up and you get a nice DVD case, with a booklet inside. Not wanting to make the mistake I have done before of reinstalling the OS and not backing up everything, I checked, and checked again.

Finally I got to the stage where I could shutdown windows, and restart, going into the nice install of Vista, but no, I soon got nowhere, I’d booted into the vista installation, but no screens would come up. My initial thoughts were a dodgy DVD, so I popped it into another computer, and it worked straight away. So i took the dvd drive out of there, put it in my computer, but to no avail. Still as slow, but I left it and eventually it did let me start to install, so it’s probably some kind of hardware problem with my computer, specs below:

• Intel Core2Duo E6300 Processor
• 1Gb DDR2 Ram
• Asus P5V-VM DH Motherboard
• Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA HDD
• Ati x1650 pro graphics

Now, the installation process, all i can say is thank god for that, you can actually use a mouse, yes, that’s right, no more flicking around the screen with arrows, you can point to where you want to do everything, and it just works. So much more simpler, it let me choose my SATA HDD without begging for a floppy disc, and everything was painlessly simple, in fact I’d say almost anyone would be able to do it, it requires about as much skill as installing a piece of software. It did seem to take a while at some parts, but I am putting it down to the problem I had earlier, although it wasn’t too slow, I was able to install everything and write this post in the time it took my brother to build a medium size lego model.

Once it’s installed it goes through a little wizard asking you your username, password, the display picture you want to use, and then finally it run’s something to give your computer that gives it a rating, which I think is out of 5. And then (again, I think) this configures your computer for optimum performance, which is a nice little addition.

Now, once Vista’s installed, you have the dread of installing all your hardware, or do you, vista offers to do this for you, and seems to be very good at finding drivers, for example, my sound card. I purchasd it a couple of weeks ago, it was a pain to get to work in XP, but vista just found the drivers, and it worked straight away, I didn’t even need a restart! (In fact, the drivers seem much more useable than what I had before) The things it didn’t install automatically are my WLAN adaptor and Analogue Video Input device, and graphics card, but for these (except for graphics card) I was just able to use the XP drivers, and both are working great so far.

Once I had everything sorted I thought it was time to get my documents back onto it, and install some software. iTunes worked straight away, and in fact it has far better visual performance now on my second monitor. I haven’t yet got round to everything, but so far everything I’ve thrown at vista has worked.

I have to say I am very impressed with vista [home premium] it is stable, responsive, and hasn’t got loads of updates to install! Windows aero, admittedly, is a novelty, but it works very nicely. I’ll probably write a bit more in depth about all the other features soon, but for now i’ve got my new toy to play with