Microsoft Vista - My first hands-on

Last night, I did a new installation of Vista onto my computer at home. I did not foresee it replacing my Windows XP soon because many softwares are still not compatible with Vista. In fact, the tool that Microsoft provides to check for compatibilities reported more than 10 applications I am currently using have problems running under Vista. As more and more software companies provide updates for Vista, I will eventually switch over. For now, I just want to get a feel for it.

The installation is surprisingly simple and fast. It no longer shows the dos mode setup screen which you see for the previous Windows versions. I had it up and running in less than an hour. The Aero3D user interface is very cool. I especially like the change to the Alt-Tab menu that shows thumbnails of the windows. As screen sizes get bigger and more people are using their LCD TV as the monitor, Microsoft is more liberal in using more of the screen spaces. Icons and menu items are much larger than before. They make it a lot easier for me to navigator on my 40" LCD TV. :)

Performance has also been improved. Typically, you would expect new softwares to be more hardware demanding, thus running sluggishly on "not-so-new" hardware. But in the case of Vista. I found many things to be faster. For example, IE 7 is running very smoothly on Vista. Especially while browsing client intensive applications, such as Yahoo's new Web 2.0 mail client. I am guessing many components of Windows have been rewritten to take advantages of multi processor machines.

Overall, I am very impressed with Vista. But it took Microsoft so long to deliver it, it better be good. I hope my softwares will be Vista-ready soon so I can switch over for good.