Windows Vista- First Impressions by David Smith

Well its been one month, and Ive been putting Windows Vista through its paces. I was a reluctant user, but because so many of my clients were upgrading, I thought it best to try it out for myself. So how was my first months experience?

This is one of the better operating system releases that Microsoft has done in recent years. Its definitely just a little better, and a little different than Windows XP, but not vastly different.

For once Microsoft seems to have released an operating system that doesnt need a year of patches to be usable. It seems to be stable and usable from day one, Ive been using it for over a month, and I havent seen it crash yet. It choked a little bit on my graphics card driver, but then there was a new driver especially suited for Vista, and it seems to work fine now.

The User Interface is probably the most improved and most altered. Things are just a little more transparent. And its just a little easier to multi-task. Its easy to have multiple windows up, each doing different tasks. One of my favorite innovations is when you hover over the tasks on the bottom taskbar, it gives you a small thumbnail of what that page looks like. This is perfect for having a few browsers open, and finding the exact page you wanted without having to open all of them.

Something new for Vista is that it comes with voice recognition already installed. No real need for $200+ voice recognition programs. It worked pretty well for me. I was actually able to type in a document or two with just my voice, and control the entire windows environment. Its definitely not a perfect implementation, but its still pretty cool.

One thing to keep in mind with Vista is that current hardware is a necessity. Vista really craves lots of memory, a fast processor and fast video card with lots of memory. If youve bought your computer in the past year, you should be fine otherwise you might need to do a few essential upgrades before you install Vista. I highly recommend at least 1GB of memory for most Vista users.

So after one month of Vista, I have to say, Im pretty pleased. Its a very fine release from Microsoft that I believe will prove to be quite popular. Its probably not worth it to spend money to upgrade as its not that different from XP. But, is a great choice for any new computers that you purchase.