• The Previous Posting

  « Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, Administrative Pop-up Fix

• The Next Posting

  The Gurus Have Been Busy.…. »

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, Short Review

We just recently obtained a copy of Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate Edi­tion, the “best of the best”. I wasn’t really sure what to expect with this, the newest ver­sion of Win­dows. I wasn’t even going to chance load­ing this soft­ware onto my every­day machine. So I loaded it onto my IBM ThinkPad T-21, with 512 of RAM. Not exactly a blaz­ing fast machine, but its always proved itself sur­pris­ingly robust.

Instal­la­tion didn’t take any-longer than XP, about 30 min­utes, and it even had almost all of my dri­vers. At first glance it looks pretty good, but the dif­fer­ences are sur­pris­ing. I heard Bill Gates say in an inter­view that “with Win­dows Vista our focus was mainly on secu­rity”. This may be so, but it seemed like the only thing Vista was try­ing to pro­tect itself from was me, the user. At every ele­va­tion of priv­i­lege, i.e. admin­is­tra­tive options, pro­gram installs, or disk drive autorun, you get a pop-up ask­ing you if this is what you really want to do. Its fine at first, and makes an aver­age user feel a lit­tle more secure. But it gets very annoy­ing very quickly. I pro­vide a fix for this here.

The first thing, besides the pop-ups, that really started to bug me was the fact that I couldn’t get online due to the fact that there were no dri­vers for my onboard Eth­er­net. In total there were two miss­ing dri­vers. I was able to even­tu­ally get the machine on my wire­less net­work, that Vista did have dri­vers for, thankfully.

So at this point I’m think­ing I’m in the clear. Wrong, I couldn’t install any of the tools I need. Espe­cially the tools I’d need to develop this site. These pro­grams include Pho­to­shop CS2, Illus­tra­tor CS2, and Macro­me­dia Stu­dio 8. So this means all I’ve got is a com­puter that can surf the web and play music. This is very sad, after years of devel­op­ment I would expect a few of my major apps to trans­fer over to Vista, and a few more dri­vers. Vista may be ready for the aver­age user, but its def­i­nitely not ready for the work­ing envi­ron­ment. I expect that after a few months most of these prob­lems will be worked out. But at this point, save your money and stick with XP.

Are you ready for Vista? Find out from Microsoft.