Windows VISTA
A Review
By SJ_niall_UK
I was sceptical regarding VISTA, with the usual questions being foremost in my mind, will i be able to run my games? Will there be a performance hit? Will i need to upgrade my rig?
I'll start of with the OS as a whole, it took about an hour to install, with no problems whatso-ever, and a nice new colour GUI to help you install it, instead of XP's old blue one, I was setting my system up as dual-boot XP & VISTA, and i had no problems partitioning my HD with this, it was very intuitive, just needing mouse clicks. The next stage of the installation was for it to gather information, in other words, enter your product code! Now this is important, in the case of the version i have all the different versions are on the same disc that is;
Home Basic,
Home Premium,
Business,
Enterprise,
Ultimate.
The product key you enter here decides which version of the OS gets installed. I have Home Premium, which includes the spangly new aero interface (more on that later), i also have the 32 bit version. Once my key was entered the install kicked off, and I pretty much left it to its own devices.
Before long it was prompting me for my name, and for a computer name, i duly entered these, and then it performed a system speed check, this is one of the more usefull VISTA features, it judges your rigs performance based on HD speed, Processor Speed, RAM and graphics card, my machine scored a 3.2, this is an all important number, as when new games come out they will have a number on the back of the box, if your number is higher or equal, your in business. One of the new security features in VISTA is that it wont install anything, unless you O.k it, the system throws a pop-up window up asking for permission, so no more backdoor porn-diallers (i hope). Vista is also running with a smaller RAM overhead than XP (on my sytem at least), it is also loading quicker than XP.
The OS is very pretty, animated everything, shadowed everything, smooth everything! VISTA Home Premium includes the, much hyped, aero interface, beware as Home Basic does not, there are some neat features of this, such as when you hover the mouse over the task bar it provides a thumbnail of the open application, and ther are transparency effects too, the actual, 3D elements though, i dont find to useful, normally if I have more than 3 windows open i'll minimise the ones that are not in immediate use, so then the stacking effect is not really too good, and lets be honest, it does not provide any usefullness or functionality.
With regards to hardware, VISTA recognised it all, install correct drivers for my soundcard and graphics card, the only thing it struggled with is my USB to ETHERNET dongle, (which i need after lightning fried my onboard LAN), however i installed the XP drivers with no complaint from VISTA, and it works perfectly, this is pretty much the case with all my old software too, MS Office 2003, Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop all installed and run with no problems (aprt from me remembering how to apply the cracks!). Itunes installed easily, and i think it catalouged my music collection quicker under VISTA, this may be something to do with the new search architecture of VISTA. The only program that is not working so far is NERO, which is a pain, and as i type i haven't found a work arround yet. Searching for files under XP was a long process, with you sitting looking at that pointless little dog, however VISTA is practically lightning in this department, which negates the need to explore the start menu, as soon as you click on the flag (used to be start), you can type what you want, and it pings up very quickly, files, folders and programs.
At the present moment i have 2 games installed, Age Of Empires III and StarWars Battlefront, both of these run perfectly, with no obvoius loss of performance, I would even go so far as to say that AOE-III is running better, my only niggle was that when installing AOE-III the OS asked me do i trust microsoft! Battlefront is exactly the same on VISTA to XP, and according to fraps the framerate has dropped by 3 to 48, I can accept that! I do not have a DX10 graphics card, and as they are nearly the price of a PS3, I dont think i will for a while, however soon enough all games will be made to use the new standard, and VISTA will be the only OS to support it, this is a reason to upgrade, but not yet, as games currently under development for DX10 such as CRYSIS, will be backwards compatible with DX9.
I then came to setting up my internet connection, i have a cable modem, and with XP i had to run the "Setup a Home or Small Office" thingy, the select my internet connection on the list, some of you are probably aware of this procedure, however with VISTA I connected my modem, booted the OS, found the connect to internet feature only to be informed i was allready connected, hopefully this ease will carry on with future upgrades/installs.
The Betas have been out so long for VISTA that i don't think there will be a service pack for along time, the official release is in very fine tuned all-ready, so for my final conclusion, I would recomend VISTA to the more experienced/adventurous current XPer's, as any problems they encounter shouldn't be too hard to solve. But would say whole-heartedly if you havent used a PC before, or if you are buying/advising a new computer user to get VISTA.
With Dual and Quad core processors, DX10 graphics cards, Terrabyte HD's and superfast internet, the future is undoutably VISTA.
