What a Vista

Today I had my first Windows Vista experience... sort of.

Here is my tale. I downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, which is supposed to support Windows Vista at a very basic level. I installed VPC 2007 on my Windows XP SP2 machine, which consists of the following basic specs:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 GHz) CPU
• 1 GB (256 x 4) DDR-400 RAM
• 160 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD at 7200 rotations/minute
  

What's important to keep in mind is that Windows Vista has a fairly high spec requirement, and my computer already just barely meets those for "ideal conditions" before virtualization. I will try to keep my comments about the actual Vista experience, with notes pointing out Virtual PC problems that I feel truly hampered the Vista experience.

Once VPC was up and running, I created a 16 GB HDD image, set 610 MB of my system RAM for Vista to use (already notice the compromises?), and tinkered with a few other parameters. I installed Windows Vista Business, as provided by BGSU via the MSDN Academic Alliance program; over five CD ISO images. Because I had the native ISO images on my local hard drive, I simply pointed VPC to them, which improved read times considerably. This was a good thing, because the install took over an hour inside VPC, mostly because of the virtualization.

Once at a desktop, I quickly made myself comfortable with the Vista Basic desktop. Yes, VPC only emulates a video card with 4 MB of video memory, thus Aero Glass and its close sister Aero Standard are out of the equation. Aero Basic is by no means ugly, with clean lines, non-offensive colors, and a fairly responsive feel (at least for VPC). The new Segoe system font used throughout Vista is certainly appealing as a sans-serif font, and brings a less "rigid" feel to the UI, although readability dropped very slightly for me.

Locating familiar options and the sort was not as hard as I first thought, as the layouts for Control Panel tasks are much easier to sort through. The familiar "Properties" that one would use after a right-click on the desktop now reads a more Gnome-friendly "Personalize," from which a special panel appears to provide access to altering not just desktop wallpaper or themes, but all aspects about your desktop.

The UAC (User Account Control) seems like a joke to me. In my experience it has been an all-or nothing shot, with my account running in limited user mode until an application requests "full access" to my system for installation purposes. For me, this simply meant having to click through another dialog box every half hour. On the other hand, this will be handy when malware or another illegitimate program wants to install itself -- at least this way I'll know about it.

My main goal in using VPC to test Vista was to see if the applications that I use from day-to-day will run. So far, it's a big thumbs up.

I was unable to test many features due to limitations presented by Virtual PC, although this weekend (Saturday) I will be partitioning and installing Vista as a native OS on my PC, at which time I'll run through performance tests and will soon be back with my thoughts next week.