We have some users who are moving over to Vista at work. Mainly for testing and compatibility purposes. Oftentimes I have to support platforms I'm not running (e.g. Mac OS X). This isn't too hard, because computers is more about developing analytical skills and understanding GUIs than having a built-up knowledge base (though that knowledge base definetly helps). Still, Vista is something we will all probably be moving to sooner rather than later, so I figured I might as well move over and experience the bumps and crashes before everyone else does.

    I figured I'd give my first day's impressions. First off, I had heard about the wonderous new way that Vista installs and how quickly it installs compared to the older OS's. Sadly I did not get to enjoy this experience - probably because I performed an upgrade on my XP Pro box rather than doing a fresh install (which I heard is finally doable - unlike previous versions where it resulted in significant system slow down). So after 1-2 hours of upgrading I was in.

    Not all my programs work. I haven't even touched a number of them, but an obvious example is Calgoo - a great new Java based calendar program that integrates with Google Calender (ahhemm...Mozilla if you read this here is a company to acquire, they've only been working on this for a short time and their application is already beyond Sunbird/Lightning [of course the employees are getting paid full-time to work on it, while Sunbird isn't as big an emphasis over at Mozilla]). I tried upgrading from JRE 5 Update 10 to JRE 6, but that didn't fix it. I think its probably a permissions issue, but I haven't messed with it.

    Speaking of permissions issues. My Documents wasn't very accessible to me. While I was the administrator so I could manually gain access to the files, I had to manually access them. When I attempted to add my PST file for Outook 2007 back into my Outlook I got a "access denied" message. I don't think that was the best idea on Microsoft's part, but ohh well.

    Hmmm...Any other real sore thumb issues? Not really. Things actually seem to work half-way decently. In fact, there are even a number of features I like. In theory I like the virtualization of program files and the registry on a per user basis. I'm thinking this means if you mess up these areas as one user another user will still be able to login and repair these virtualized areas. In practice it is a bit more messy. I'm not sure that it handles the virtualization perfectly. I have one app that attempts to serialize to an XML file and seems to be having some problems. My guess is because of this whole virtualization thing.

    I must say that Vista runs pretty smoothly. I like the transitions and with my 2 GB RAM laptop and 2 Ghz dual core AMD processor it seems to run pretty well. Granted, file deletions and certain actions take far too long - but I don't think this has anything to do with processor speed or RAM - I'm just deleting shortcuts.

    I'm a fan of the new security policies. I need to become much more familiar with them and figure out how to keep them from breaking all the applications - but they definetly will give us a much more "by default" secure baseline.

    The sidebar is nifty, though I don't really use it yet. I'd have to say the peripheral software programs Windows Calendar and Contacts are two that I consider most interesting. I'm not a big fan of the disk defragmenter. It doesn't show any details! How am I supposed to know how good of a job it is doing?

    Okay, that wasn't much of a post - kind of random but I don't feel like going back and rewriting it. So tata.