Yesterday evening I installed Vista for the first time. I guess I am both pleasantly surprised and not so :-)
Good
- While the installation took its time there was relatively little user interaction and all of it in the beginning. All I had to do was leave my old notebook alone and come back an hour later.
- Even though my old notebook is over 2 years old, closer to 2.5 actually, the speed isn’t that bad. Sure it is slower than XP but I guess that is to be expected. Now if I could only remember why that is supposed to be the case :-)
- Security seems to be better. Several times I received a notification that a driver needs to be installed and would I grant it the required privileges. Now I am not a security expert so I can't comment on how secure it is but I am sure someone else will.
Bad
- First I tell the installer that I want to use the Dutch language settings. Next when we come to the clock part it suggest using US time. Now how likely is it that I am living in the US and want Dutch language settings? Not very is my take. So how about a slightly more intelligent default?
- I tried to run Charles Petzold samples from http://www.charlespetzold.com/wpf/ and they wouldn't run because the WinFX runtime wasn't present. Seems kind of strange that the WinFX runtime isn’t part of Vista when that is supposed to be the way to develop .Net applications. Than again maybe there was an older version or MS can’t include it by default because of the lawsuits.
But what I am wondering about most of the time is why people need to upgrade from XP to Vista. Sure it is more secure but most people don't care all that much, large numbers still connect to the internet without a router or decent firewall! Large companies do care but they typically tend to keep their PC longer so my take is that their average machine is going to be to slow to run Vista. Specially when you consider that most business PC's have only mediocre graphics cards and Vista want's a fast graphics card with hardware acceleration.
So I guess that leaves techno nerds, who are going to upgrade to any new gadget, and new PC's sold with Vista preinstalled. Sure sounds like Vista adoption is going to take a while :-(