johng Blog

Having obtained an OEM version of Vista a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and move my main computer over to Microsoft’s much hyped new OS. Choosing to install the 32 bit version over the 64 bit one seemed like a wise move even with my modern processor due to the driver issues usually involved with the latter. Sure enough, after a smooth installation process, which is vastly improved over XP, I didn’t need to install a single driver to have a usable system.

So far so good. Booting in for the first time was cool, I quite like the effects such as the blurred glass and the window transitions. It gives Windows a much slicker feel then before even if purely aesthetic and of no functional use. After a playing about with this for a while and tweaking the system a little it suddenly hit me, where are the new features? I can see a sidebar, nice, now I don’t need to install the Google one, I can see indexed search, nice, now I don’t need Google desktop and I can see Giant Windows Defender, uhoh, better install AVG.

Having the Ultimate edition does entitle me to a bit of Media Center action. It hooks up well to the 360 allowing me to access all my masses and masses of Media Center recordings and the many WMV files I have stored right in the living room. Yeh so that’s not much use with the current crop of codec support. I am a strong advocate of MPEG-4 (especially AVC aka x264) and when it won’t even allow native playback of Xvid files it’s not much use to me. The fact that all they need to do is switch on direct show codecs to get it to work added to the fact the the 360 can natively decode x264 in software (!) makes it a bit of a joke.

Games support in Vista is a bit hit and miss. I played through the latest Sam and Max episode without a hitch but when trying to install Jaws Unleashed (I kid you not) I didn’t have much luck. Supreme Commander is looking like the next big thing to hit the PC so I will be nailing that in the next few weeks for sure. The real seller on Vista for me is Live Anywhere which won’t hit till summer making it perfectly ok to hold off upgrading. Getting achievement points for PC games is definitely appealing to me.

Third party application support much like the games is a mixed bag and I will write a separate post on this entirely to see if I can drum up some help.

Overall I am impressed with the OS if a little let down by the number of new features available right now. It’s certainly not a revolution but it provides some much needed polish to an OS that has been on the shelves far too long without an update. Once the Ultimate Extras and Live Anywhere hit I am quite positive that Vista will start to come into its own.