My Vista Experience? It Rocks!

I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a somewhat lengthy post summarising my experiences with Windows Vista, but Ed Bott has beaten me to the punch with a very well written post.

My experience with Vista hasn’t been totally smooth - but the problems have been relatively minor.

User Access Control pops up only occasionally - when installing new software or when an existing product self upgrades. I don’t use any applications that misbehave and provoke a UAC storm (see related story, below).

My >Driver experience hasn’t been totally smooth - but the blame for that lies entirely with NVidia, not with Microsoft … and the latest drivers are good enough.

I’m running Vista on somewhat legacy hardware - a Pentium 4 @ 3GHz, 1.5GB of memory and PATA drives. Not a speed demon (my laptop is significantly higher spec’d) but my experience with Vista is quite snappy - I’m only left waiting for things to happen when I knowingly overload the machine. For what it’s worth, my Windows Experience Index is 4.2 - with the processor being the limiting factor.

My Vista Experience: It works, and works very well.

True Story: At Tech Ed 2007, I sat through a presentation on Vista’s new security model that was totally hijacked by dimwitted developer who kept pressing the presenter to reveal how to disable the new security features so that his existing application could continue to misbehave. It quickly became clear that the dimwit’s application was doing many things (like storing user data under Program Files) that had been against recommendations for many years (likely since the release of Windows 98) - and that they relied on the system continuing to not enforce these guidelines. I figure that in 8 years there would have been an opportunity or two to move user data somewhere sanctioned.