Vista

january 21, 2008

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.


<< back || ultramookie >>