A week in, Vista seem more to me to be little more than a hardware-intensive visual update. I'm very happy to have the built-in firewall, and though the Cancel or Allow pop-up is annoying and quite humourous at the same time, I've grown to appreciate the motivation behind it. With Windows, you need this sort of careful protection in ways you don't with other OSes.

Past that, though, it seems to be just a new skin on top of Windows, often for the worse. The networking control panels are particularly hard to operate with dialup, in large part due to an over-reliance on HTML navigation paradigms. Internet Explorer seems to be just under the [new] skin everywhere you look, and rather than providing good navigational clues from one pane to the next, I'm often hitting the "back" button I never expected would exist.

Occasionally, I'm hit by the impression that Vista just isn't finished. Once, I received a dialog box that Aero, apparently a fancy-smancy Quartz Extreme/Aqua parallel, was slowing my performance down. Unfortunately I have Vista Home Basic, which shouldn't have Aero. When I clicked the link for help, I was told that help file didn't exist on my version of the OS. That Windows Live Mail can't check Hotmail... but that Windows Live Mail Beta claims to [1]... is another example.

[1] I don't know if it's telling the truth yet; it starts with an error telling me I need to be connected to the net. I am, dang it!

In any event, I've only lost one peripheral so far to the lack of Vista drivers, but it's one of my scanners which I'd like to keep *coughcough* at least until I can find the power supply to the other *coughcough*. To use it, I'll need to install Win2k on my Vista machine, which apparently requires some new hoop jumping.

Dual Boot Vista and XP (part 2)

Not so fast! Vista has done away with boot.ini and now has something way more complex: the Boot Configuration Data store.

...

Enter VistaBootPRO*!


We'll see how it goes.