I installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my main PC notebook. I admit it. I did it. Yesterday.
While I loved having Fedora 8 — or in general any distro of Linux — on the notebook, I wanted to do stuff that I couldn’t do in Linux. One of the big drivers was the fact that Netflix’s Instant Play just went unlimited. That means that I can stream as much as I want from Netflix and still have my three DVDs delivered. That makes for a wonderful deal at $14 a month. The only problem was that the Netflix player only works in Windows. Sigh.
A side benefit is that I can now play some of my older games, like Command and Conquer.
Other than the stuff that came with Windows Vista, I haven’t really put any other tools on there that need to be purchased. Everything else is pretty much Open Source stuff — Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org. There’s some freeware stuff that I installed also like iTunes and Yahoo! Messenger.
Installation was a breeze (Microsoft did do a good job of cleaning up the install process). Most of my devices were detected and installed during installation — whatever was left (like a MemoryStick reader) was later installed during a Windows Update. Vista is not as slow or bad as people say it is — I am running it on a older Celeron M 420 notebook that I bought in April, the box has 2GB of RAM, a fast SATA drive, but suffers from slow built-in video. Is there “Wow” in Vista like Bill Gates wants people to believe? Not really. Vista is really a five year warmed over version of XP with some extra bells and whistles added on. It works, it’s OK.
Jan 21st, 2008 at January 21, 2008 8:06 pm
Like i’ve told everyone I know who’s installed it, let me know what you think of it.
To be honest, since you don’t have a lot of experience with Windows, it’ll probably work fine for you. It’s only inseacently annoying to folks that have lived in windows for years.
Jan 21st, 2008 at January 21, 2008 9:29 pm
hehe, all my mac and linux talk has fooled you jr. my windows experience is pretty deep…on the consumer side i started at 3.0 and have now worked all the way to vista — yes, i even had a stint using windows me, which still stands out as the worst windows yet. on the professional side, i worked from nt 3.5 to 4.0 to windows 2000. i skipped out on 2003.
there are stuff in vista that annoy the crap out of me (like the new start menu), but apparently there are ways to get the “old” way back. i also notice that vista hits the harddrive a LOT — just little taps all day long. that is really annoying.