After two months of use I’m still loving it. Infact I am loving it more than I ever loved Windows XP (Blasphemy!). Infact I’m so used to everything Vista that now when I am at work and trying to explain something to someone, I have to stop and think oh wait, their still in XP. As far as my experience with Operating Systems goes, or software in general, Vista Ultimate is the cats meow.
So yeah, my performance rating isn’t the highest it could be, but that’s because my processor only scored a 5.3. I got 5.9’s on everything else. I am running fairly beefy system which helps. My only critism is that things seem to take just a bit longer to execute games for instance taking a full minute to load. Though I have noticed that this only seems to happen with a certain type of game. Some of them still load almost instantly. Also I’ve noticed some hesitation pulling up file structures and browsing folders. It seems to take longer for the file indexing service to process these activities.
Other than that, the interface is gorgeous and almost completely customizable. I love that you can finally set your start bar to match your background or make it translucent. On top of that, the new search engine is amazing. Sometimes, it late at night, or I’m in a hurry and I just have a hell of a time tracking down a program in my start menu. With the new search engine, all you have to do is hit the windows key and start typing the name of the program and it finds it for you. If you’re close enough to the name all you have to do is hit enter and it will open right there. You can do that for any program or file on the computer. Ever try to find a picture to show someone and gotten stuck digging through folder after folder trying to remember how you categorized it? Now all you gotta do is type in what you named it and bam it’s there! SO much nicer than the old XP search that would take minutes to dig through 300 possibilities.
Also, my next favorite feature… the mouse over preview windows. They allow the program to run in the preview window. So if you’re playing WoW or Secondlife and you need to check out a web page real quick, you can keep track of your activities just by mousing over the program on your start bar. It works awesome if you have a bunch of program windows open and want to quickly bounce from one to the other.
Also Alt+Tab has a new look. It also shows your programs in a preview window so you can Alt+Tab much more precisely to the right window. And now, even cooler if your PC can handle it, the Windows+Tab key brings up the Aero 3D program browser. Thus allowing you to see all of your programs running three dimensional stacked view where you can either cycle through them by continuing to hold the Windows key and tapping the Tab key or by clicking on which one you want with your mouse. It’s very much a frill feature where you don’t really use it unless you think about it but it’s pretty cool so you’ll try to find a way to work it in.
3D gaming performance is the bees knees with DirectX10.1. Of course my video card is what really makes this possible but you miss out on a lot of effects and detail without it. 16X AA shows you the game the way it was meant to be played. Fire looks and burns like fire instead of an under detailed orange blob. It totally made paying $250 for a video card worth it.
So I guess that’s pretty much my review of Vista. Everything I ran in Windows XP still runs in Vista. My printer prints fine, all my devices are reconized. Everything I have needed thus far has been Vista compatible. Even for my 64Bit version which requires 64bit drivers for everything.
So I give Vista Ultimate very high marks. I definately feel that it was a worthwhile platform and I hope they continue to support it after Windows 7 releases. I’ve heard Windows 7 is really just a new spin on Vista and not actually a new OS so why not be able to support both? I wonder if that means Windows 7 is going to turn out to be another Windows ME. I guess we’ll see. I’ve hedged my bet.
