And so it begins
Today begins my ongoing blog of "Life With Windows Vista". This isn’t a Vista review per se, as there are plenty of those around the web if that’s what you are looking for. This is going to be a periodic recount of my experiences, thoughts, troubles, and joys in a "Life With Windows Vista".

I decided to be one of those "uber-enthusiasts" who always has to be on the cutting edge. My original plan for months was to get a hold of Vista, dual-boot, and "wait for the bugs to be worked out" (or for the first service pack). Instead, however, I now find myself using Vista Ultimate as my primary OS.

What brought about the change of heart? Well, I paid decent money for a full copy of Vista Ultimate Retail, and I have pretty solid hardware. Plus, I figured after I just bought a 8800GTS that any performance hit I experienced in games with Vista vs. XP wouldn’t be very noticeable with the new video card. I thought to myself, "Why did I buy this if I am only going to let it sit on the shelf or in limited use for months?" It didn’t make sense.

So here is my current set up. Vista Ultimate is on my main hard drive, my 150GB Western Digital Raptor. I am dual-booting with XP for only one reason, and that is hardware testing for this site. I have a vanilla/fresh XP SP2 install on another drive with my benchmarking and testing apps and games.

I won’t be gaming or using XP day to day at all, this is a full switch over to Vista. If I didn’t need the XP install for GotFrag Hardware I wouldn’t be using it at all.

So how is life under Vista? Well it helps having a solid rig, here is what I am running right now:

• Intel E6700 Core 2 Duo (2.67GHz)
• eVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (Superclocked, 574MHz core/1700MHz memory)
• Crucial Ballistix 2048MB DDR2 1000MHz
  
• Universal Abit AW9D-MAX
• Western Digital 150GB Raptor

If you check my screenshots you can see my set up scores a 5.5 on the Windows Experience Index. I'll get in to more of that next time along with the new game panel, and some other interesting features.


I wouldn’t recommend this switch to everyone, but I have to admit I love new technology - from applications, to hardware, and even OSes. Thus, I really wanted to dig in and toy around with it.

Quick thoughts from the install:

It's fast - much quicker than XP - and less intrusive, meaning that it doesn’t require user input mid-install. The boot manager is a nice replacement to the boot.ini file in XP and it allows managing dual boots easier. I was quite surprised how easily most of my hardware was automatically recognized. Remember the days of having to fish and hunt around for drivers because they weren’t supported by XP yet?

Well that’s a wrap on the first part of my weekend with Vista. Stay tuned for continued updates and opinions from yours truly.

Related
Life With Windows Vista: Issue 2
Vista Coverage