Guess what I did yesterday?! I installed Windows Vista! Legally, I might add. It seems Microsoft has released Vista Beta 2 to the public for testing, and I wanted to test it out to see if all the rumors I've been hearing were accurate.

First thing I noticed was Aero. It's gorgeous. Far understated in reviews. You have to see it yourself to get the full feel for it. It doesn't seem to be some useless bubbley interface like XP. It's actually pretty moderate as far as distracting frills go and everything looks like it belongs.

Next thing I noticed was the speed. People are going on and on about how Vista is so slow and unresponsive and how horrible it is. Well, try using it on a computer within the minimum specs, or shut off Aero and make it look like 98 again. (Which is how my XP is currently set up.) Most computers you get new these days will be more than strong enough for Vista, and, if you ask me, any computer that can't run Vista needs upgraded if you're trying to keep with current technology. (Our family has a Dell... 733mhz, 512MB RAM, 64MB videocard... very not Vista-capable... very needs-to-be-upgraded.) I have Vista running on P4 3ghz/HT, 512MB RAM, 256MB GeForce 5700. Very nice. I may partition my laptop and see what Vista can do on it... hwahaha. PM 2ghz, 2GB RAM, 256MB GeForce 6800Go. Blows the desktop out of the water in performance.

One bad thing I've come across... sound drivers. I have an Audigy in my desktop and, if you know anything about Creative, you know that they have NASTY driver support. Think ATI of the soundcard industry. (heheh) They've never given Microsoft built-in drivers for any of their soundcards (especially not any Audigy) and the drivers they have up on their website are from November 2005, for whichever build of Vista was available at that time. Needless to say, Creative forums are full of angry people demanding a driver for the first public release of Vista. I tried to activate my motherboard soundchip, but it's a soundchip... and I'm not sure if there were ever any weirdnesses with it, but it doesn't like Winamp/DirectX 10.

I haven't had any crashes, yet... from anything. Seems to be shaping up to be an XP all over again, or better. Drivers malfunction and explode, but the OS stays rock-solid. Hopefully, I'll get sound drivers working properly and I can try using Skype, which, under XP, leaks memory over the course of a conference and after about 2 hours, uses all available system RAM and decimates the entire computer. (Unless I can close it before it locks everything up.) It'll be interesting to see if programs can die around Vista and not affect it like they say. (They also say that drivers can explode around Vista, but they've isolated drivers into their own section of memory, so crashes don't affect the OS.)

The installation was nice and fast, too. Faster than I recall XP being, and, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any 5 million steps to authorize your copy like all these doomsayers like to complain about. So far, it's just like XP. Type in the key, after installation is done, you activate online. Tada! Done.

One complaint I have is that the Volume Control has sliders per active application instead of per utility on the soundcard... like general, wave, midi, microphone, etc. Now it's just general, then 'windows sound scheme' and then whatever app you have open at the moment.

Networking was automatic and surprisingly painless. Even when sharing files. I'd actually go for a more technical approach to file sharing, but, as it is, you have a global file sharing preferences window where you can tell Windows to allow anyone on the network to access shares, or only those who have an account on that system. (Which is what I'd set up on XP.) So you just right-click the folder, share, add users and access rules and tada! Done. I think I shared a folder on a new OS in record fastest time. (Linux/BSD and Samba take record slowest. Hah... Mac OSX was pretty fast, too.)

There was a nifty (but annoying) feature that was active when I first logged in... every time a program tried to start that I didn't click on, a window would pop up saying "allow?" It was extremely annoying at first, because I was running a lot of auto-starting programs to set things up, but then I realized... this would be an indispensable tool when troubleshooting spyware. They always auto-start. If this thing popped up whenever spyware tried to start? Awesome. This thing even pulled over Vista's auto-starting apps. So nobody has immunity. It's called User Access Control. Look it up! (Yes, you can shut it off very quickly and easily.)

I'm trying to think of anything else I've experimented with. I haven't had much time to do stuff, because I've been busy, but Firefox installed and opened flawlessly, as did Winamp (though sound drivers prevent playback). Gaim seemed to install nicely, too, but I haven't tested it, yet. The Start Menu seriously threw me for a loop when I went to fun the Run option. There wasn't any... except for a funky little search field that listed, in realtime, search matches for whatever you're typing in. It worked at finding what I wanted to open, so I chalked it up to a useless extra step Microsoft built. Well, I was wrong... that field is a search, and it IS the Run field. I typed CMD into it and pressed enter (before searches appeared) and voila! Command prompt opened! So... it's search if you don't press Enter, and Run if you do. Now I'm officially impressed with the new Start Menu.

They rearranged the Control Panel, though, even in "classic mode". But finding things was relatively easy for me. I usually right-click the desktop image to get Display Properties, but it gave me an option called "Personalize" in the place of "Properties". So I clicked it to see what it was... and it was essentially the very same thing with extra stuff tossed in.

Anyway, time for me to head off... I'll write more later.