Windows Vista -- First Impressions

I've had Windows Vista Business 32-bit installed on my computer at work for a little over a week now. At first I hated it. It would always bring up a prompt telling you that "Windows needs your permission to continue." It turns out that Vista runs every user in a non-administrator mode and when it needs to elevate your privileges to Administrator, it lets you know what is going on. I suppose this is a good thing. Spyware and Viruses can't be installed anymore, at least not yet.

I'll quickly go over the things that I like the best about Vista:





Flip-3D

Flip-3D is a new alternative to using Alt+Tab to switch between Windows. To use it you press Win+Tab instead of Alt+Tab. It stacks up all your Windows in a cool 3D interface. You can then click on a window, use the scroll wheel on the mouse, or continue pressing Win+Tab until the window that you want comes up.








The Aero Interface

The new default theme on Windows Vista is the Aero Glass interface. Aero adds cool animations when maximizing, minimizing and switching between windows. It also gives you a nice preview of each window when you place your mouse over the taskbar button for it. Aero just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside :)





The Start Menu

The new Start Menu for Windows Vista is way cool! It no longer stretches your program folders across the screen. Instead it keeps them in place so you don't have to continue to move your mouse to the right to find a program. The new search feature at the bottom of the start menu is way awesome too! It will launch all of your programs straight from the search box! For example, if you want to start paint (as shown in the picture), simply type "paint" in the box and press enter. It rocks!




Installation and Repair Process

In Windows XP if you wanted to install the operating system on hardware that wasn't supported out of the box (i.e. RAID systems), you had to create a floppy disk with the drivers on it and then make sure to hit F6 right at the start of the Windows installation process. In Windows Vista, simply throw your drivers on a USB flash disk or CD-R and click on the Load Drivers button. It is that simple! The repair process also adds new and easy ways to fix your operating system, should something go wrong. You can use System Restore to go back to a restore point, use the automatic repair feature, or bring up a command prompt and do it all yourself. You can also load network and hard disk drivers on the fly. It is way cool!

Well, I have Windows Vista Business x64 installed on my computer at home now. So far, I am very impressed! I am tempted to delete my XP x64 partition and go Vista all the way! Good job so far, Microsoft!

(Windows Vista, Aero, and many more names used on this page are copyrighted by Microsoft. Also, the images used on this page are the property of Microsoft, yeah, even the screenshots that I made of my programs I'm sure belong to them somehow.)