Vista RC1

My copy of XP Pro recently started behaving very badly (regular blue-screen), after some development tools went awry. This meant that I needed to reinstall everything (fortunately, everything was backed up) � so I figured I�d give Vista Release Candidate 1 a try. Doubtless, my clients will use it, so I have to know about it in advance. After my experiences with Betas 1 and 2, I feared the worst�

Installation was painless. The 64-bit version downloaded reasonably fast, burned easily to a DVD, and the installer was very easy � on par with Ubuntu. It found all of my hardware except my printer/scanner/copier, a re-branded Lexmark. The installer looked great, and didn�t seem to take very long. I was very pleasantly surprised that support for my nice nVidia card worked out of the box, as did sound (both problems with prior betas).

Logging in, joining my domain, and playing around was not only painless � it was slick. Very fast, smooth, and the eye-candy has been made painless but nice. Office, Visual Studio, Internet Information Services, World of Warcraft, Oblivion, VersaCheck, Money 2006 � all installed and worked perfectly. I had to enable compatibility mode (and run the process as an Administrator) for Microsoft Small Business Accounting � but it works fine once I did that.

Performance is very good, about equal to XP Pro (64-bit). Network performance is notably faster under heavy load � equal to Linux and FreeBSD on this system. Memory management has definitely improved; I filled up all my 2gb of RAM and swapping was less obvious. Sleep finally works.

Best of all, TPM (Trusted Computing � aka Treacherous Computing) doesn�t work on my motherboard� and I appear to have not lost anything for it! That was my main �I won�t buy Longhorn/Vista� argument, and now it�s gone. The system seems pretty secure, and while being prompted for administrative rights whenever I do something requiring them is odious, I think it will help in the long-term.

In other words: I take back all of my previous gripes. It�s really nice!

Mood: cheerful
Music: None