Vista 5342 First Impressions
Downloaded the latest Vista build and wanted to get up and running this weekend.
It took me about 1 hr 45 minutes to install on a Celeron 2.4, 768 MB ram. The setup was relatively flawless once I determined that I needed to clear off at least 12 GB of space. I only had about 9 GB free- lots of junk in the recycle bin. I didn't format the drive prior to installing- just installed right over XP.
First impressions...
- Really great build.
- IE seems to render great. Lots of cool new features.
- I was surprised how stable this build has been so far. I've installed some programs to interface with my cell phone and other USB type devices and they've worked pretty well.
- Media Center- new and improved UI. The main up and down scrolling w/ large fonts remains. There is an additional horizontal scrolling that I really like. On the to do list for next week is playing around with the SDK and the MCML examples. It also looks like adding an extender might be a little easier / more straightforward than doing so in MCE 2005.
- Aero Glass interface: It is a nice touch. I am running a 128MB Geforce 5500 and it handles it well. The way the windows minimize/maximize is nice eye candy, but not much more. Overall the rest of the interface is pretty similar to XP. The first thing I did was change it back to classic so I could be productive.
The not so great:
- IE was having problems rendering some of the commmon sites I visit such as digg.com, and Xanga.com. The rich textbox control isn't loading on community server so I am having to mark up with HTML.
- My built in audio is really choppy. It breaks up when playing back any kind of music file.
- Things do run pretty well, but not as snappy as what I am used to. That is certainly to be expected with beta software!
Overall I am very excited about Vista. I still have a ways to explore!!