Last week I got on beach ( in Thoughtwork’s parlance – rest of the world calls it the bench for awaiting project allocation ). And I got vista ultimate installed in my Dell 620, 2GB RAM. Had to make some free space – actually lots of it – to install vista. Then once installation began I got an error on step 1 – An installation error has occurred. Restart installation. I did that a few times till my co beacher found that you need not enter the key and click next – thats what I did. Later I found while activating that the key I have is for enterprise – perhaps thats why the installation error?

Now I glanced at my harddrive after the installation. It had consumed 10Gigs. Now thats lot of stuff. Is the OS going to predict my next click?

Being an ardent Mac fan and an ubuntu fan I had lot of expectations for this contender. However I had to turn off aero’s animations because its not smooth. I turn off compiz’s goodiness too because it gets in my way. Only in OS X I let the graphics be on because they do not hinder me.

Pluses :

1. Hibernate and waking is instantaneous – just like how my (now) dead 800MHz, G3 ibook used to do in 2002. Good job MSFT – finally you have recreated something thats been there for ages.
2. The dethrottling controls on the battery power icon – it turns off network adapter. I dont know if the network adapter is a sucker but I feel good that my laptop’s battery is stretched.
3. Search button on start. So useful.
4. Network – finally MS has got it right. Connects to my home wireless internet – automatically. For some reason in xp I had to manually search and discover every time.

Cons :

1. User Access control or some feature the MS overlords thought about – gave me a headache till I turned it off. Deleting a harmless file – does it warrant an annoying warning. Each and every step it annoys you. Dont they have high paid usability analysts – how didnt they see it?
2. Its not smooth and gliding – I cannot blame my laptop – come compiz running on the other side is so smooth and gliding? same hardware right – when I come oranges to oranges why does vista aero suck so much?
3.Indexing is a joke. Howcome I never read any complaints from leopard users about timemachine being a drag. I got a good performance boost by turning off indexing ( Thanks Sanchit )

Can go on but now time to play with my sonny. He is now up and wants attention !! More fun than talking about vista.