An Encounter with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
With the hype surrounding the Windows Vista ( Microsoft’s much acclaimed flagship Operating System for those who are still at large bout what nonsense am talking..) i decided to take part in the Customer Review Program of the RC1 which Microsoft is/was offering.
I read through pages and pages of review to make sure that the release was the top-of-the line Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. After being satisfied that it was indeed so i decided to register to get a Product Key. By-the-way Microsoft gave free Product Key for testing the Beta2 of Vista and also is giving(or gave??) for RC1 which you can safely use on upto 10 PC as is stated by Microsoft in the e-mail and you have to register that copy of Windows Vista to activate it so that you can use it till 31st May 2007 else you get to use it for 14 days only. Having gone through the elaborate process of registering and getting a Product Key decided finally to get(read download 2.52GB of pure shit by wasting my precious bandwidth) my copy of Vista. Having downloaded it at a constant rate(got 40kBps 
) in 18 hours i found to my horror that it required a 20GB hard disk with 15GB free space(which effectively translates to a free partition of 20GB or more). My 40GB hard Disk being partitioned into 15GB(C: Drive) and 22GB(D: Drive) i had to redo the partitions.
There after searching for RC1 compatible drivers i downloaded all those applicable for my system(one for my 6600GT from nVidia and one for my Sound Blaster Live! 24 bit from Creative).Satisfied and having done the partitions and after burning the ISO file of Vista to a DVD-RW i proceeded to install it. Thus started the hurdles and problems which did not seem to end.
The first problem i encountered was Vista no longer supported NTFS partition. I had to resort to the use of the command prompt that is available within the Vista Installer. Using it i had to convert the 22GB FAT32 to NTFS. One thing i noticed was MS had done away with the boring blue screen of their previous OS es. This one had a graphical interface and no longer identified the partitions as C:;D:;E: drives i.e. by their drive letter, rather identified the drives as Disk1 Partition1, Disk1 Partition2 , Disk 2 Partition 1 etc. Seems MS has taken some leaves out of its rival Linux’s book.
Anyways after the installer detected my previously called D: Drive which i had converted to the required C: Drive as being capable of Vista installation the highly anticipated Installation started. But the installation seemed ages to take to complete.
The installation did complete at last and Vista started its process of finding out what i was entitled to use. But the process seemed to get stuck in the middle and since it did not give any indication as to what was the problem i did a Hard Booting of my PC( in lay man’s term pressing the reset/restart button). After the PC rebooted Vista did finally boot up. But the icing on the cake was that it did not recognize my Sound Card and showed a Unknown Hardware error. After installing the RC1 specific driver (which i had thankfully downloaded previously) i was able to get the damn sound. But not being able to control the 5 channels and the sub-woofer through the Creative control panel i installed the driver which came with the CD. But the sound went off..poof..Again install the RC1 specific driver. Thus the final equation : Install RC1 specific driver to get the hardware identified + install the drivers which came on CD + reinstall the RC1 drivers = Sound + perfect control of all the 5.1 channels independently.
Now comes the most interesting part. The user experience. Well frankly speaking MS has tried to give it’s flagship OS a face lift and to some extent has been successful. I was able to run the Aero interface but it didn’t come to my mind to try the Flip 3D part of Aero. Vista now uses an active indexing system to speed up specific file searching and that thing sucks for it uses up a hell lot of resources and thus slowing down your system to the point of bringing it down to its knees. But the overall performance seems a bit slow. Maybe it can be attributed to the fact that its still an RC1 and hence there’s lot of room for improvement and removal of bugs. The Aero glass look and feel feels good but makes systems a bit slower. Also a major problem is backward compatibility of softwares. I was trying my favourite FREE firewall but Vista refused to start it repeatedly. There were lots of softwares for which i had to get some form of replacement. Talking bout security Vista has got a feature which allows you to install softwares as normal user or with administrative privileges(which is done by right clicking on an installer and selecting “Run as administrator”. Whenever a software is being installed Vista puts it in a container to prevent accidental virus infection. But it can become irritating at times.
Things started taking up such a bad shape that for me Vista was slowly becoming a pain in the ass. I started getting so frustrated that i thought i should get the better out of Vista and decided to reinstall the reliable Windows XP again.
Overall though MS has tried to give an eye popping product it has been partially successful. A lot of bugs need to be ironed out and backward compatibility with some softwares restored. There are a lot of things bout Vista thats still pending to be discussed but right now am tired after doing a fresh installation of XP and all my favourite softwares. So see you people soon.
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