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Windows Vista Ultimate Impressions

April 12th, 2007 by matt.hughes

A few weeks ago after talking to my good friend, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my system to Windows Vista Ultimate. Now, price is not an issue for me because I get all versions of Vista in my MSDN subscription so Ultimate was really the only choice. My system specs are moderate these days:

P4 3.2Ghz
1Gb RAM
256 GeForce 6600 GT Video Card

With these specs I have no problems running Vista with all the eye candy enabled, I could do with another Gig of RAM just to get everything running as smooth as Windows XP. I’ll break this down into things I like and things I dislike.

Windows Vista Ultimate

What I Like

  • Aero looks AMAZING!
  • Vista feels polished and for me it’s been rock solid
  • IE7 and Media Player 11 have matured into really great applications (Also available in XP)
  • Windows Sidebar is useful and nowhere near as annoying as I expected it to be
  • Super Fetch!!

    Basically Super Fetch is where Vista learns your system and how you use your applications. It then caches those applications so that when you need to launch them they are up and running in a matter of seconds. Now if you’ve just installed Vista don’t expect this to happen right away, it takes a week or so for Vista to really learn what your usage patterns are. I use Visual Studio / SQL Server Management apps, Photoshop etc, and have noticed massive improvements in load times over Windows XP

  • Dream Scene which is basically video backgrounds is pretty darn cool
  • The Start Menu feels allot cleaner and organised

    What I Dislike

  • My integrated soundcard in Vista has a few problems with sound turning off at random times, apparently it’s all driver related so I hope this is fixed soon.
  • Gaming performance takes quite a massive hit in Vista. I can no longer play Dungeons and Dragons Online with a smooth frame rate. I’m going to be adding another 1Gb RAM in the next week so I’ll revisit gaming performance then.
  • It still feels like XP. Whilst it’s all nice and flash it still feels like Windows just with a new coat of paint.

    As you can probably tell there’s way more I like about Vista than I dislike. I’m going to upgrade the RAM in my computer and eventually the Video Card so this should take care of my issues with gaming. Honestly though 2Gb of RAM is what you’re going to need to get the general performance out of Windows Vista that you do with Windows XP and 1Gb of RAM.

    Ok, so that wraps up my first impressions of Windows Vista. What have your experiences been like?

    • One Response to “Windows Vista Ultimate Impressions”

    1. on 12 Apr 2007 at 9:09 am   matt.hughes

      WOW!

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