So I saw a story on slashdot that Vista 5728 had been released to the public. So, I signed up for another BS hotmail account, signed up for Windows Live and signed up for an RC1 key. Downloaded the DVD .iso, burned it and installed it on a blank drive I had.

So I realize that Vista is just an RC at this point, I realize that my views won’t change the world (hi, obvious) and I’m a Mac Fanboy Extreme™. However, I’ve tried lots of OSs in my day and I really don’t like taking crap design or taking crap tech no matter what the brand® is.

The installer was just lovely (seriously it is). It’s such an improvement over the old 80×20 DOS installers of the NT/2000 days. Finally an installer on par with most Linux distros, Solaris, BeOS and OSX. It certainly took them a while but you don’t need partition magic to sort out what partition is what or what disk has how much space. I nuked an unknown partition and installed on a blank drive very quickly.

The install didn’t take too long. I had to enter my serial number, choose my user icon (it’s this huge MS Live push) and some other “preferencey” options. Soon, the login screen was staring at me and I was impressed with the experience so far.

I added a few gadgets and this is what we ended up with. RC1 Vista ‘Ultimate’.

It’s a huge improvement to XP. It’s short of OSX though. The nagging popups are still there, “do you want to run this? are you sure?”. I couldn’t even edit boot.ini on my old XP partition, said “access denied”, although I could have messed with the NTFS permissions, it seems like the average user is just going to run as administrator again.

I copied WoW over from XP and fired it up, no problem. IE7 is nice but not as nice as Firefox. For some reason, MS just doesn’t get fonts. I swear. My site looks like ass and they don’t have the AntiAliasing any better than XP. Some apps just look like blurry XP apps. The services view is still the same as it was in 2000. Notepad still sucks.

On the plus side, I really, really love the Gadgets. They might be a total rip-off but the grab handles are pretty cool. Windows Mail is slick and Live Mail supports Gmail (it detects the domain and sets it up as POP). The control panel is a bit confusing, many times I felt like there were no new features and they just shuffled everything around for change’s sake. The screensavers are nice but there are some that suck and there are some that are so obviously ripped off from Apple (ribbon, I’m looking at you).

But most of all, the file structure is laughably ripped off. Let’s take a look at a user’s home folder on OSX:

$ pwd
/Users/chris


What is it in Vista?

> cd
c:\Users\chris


Rofl. Whatever. Vista has some things good about it but all in all, I think XP does a good and fast job without charging me $399 for “Ultimate Edition”.