These are very, very early mutterings…

Well, it finished installing during the night, I’m not sure how long it really took, but I heard it let out that happy noise computers make when restarting at some point and in the morning I had a Vista login screen to look at.

It’s driver support must be limited, the intel video card in this Vaio hasn’t been found and I’m limited to 640×480x16bit VGA.

It found the wireless card and the wireless setup stuff was much simplified - but it didn’t work :)  Fixing the wireless connection came back with a diagnostic that said the reason my wireless network didn’t work was…… no cable connnected.

Well.  Ahem… yes, I would have expected that!

Still, two unix guys couldn’t get this laptop working with wireless under debian either, so we’ll give MS the benefit of the doubt.

Other thoughts… its slow… I mean, really slow… Of course, this laptop doesn’t go anywhere near the min requirements (I should have at least 512MB Ram and a dedicated Video card), but to its credit, the laptop did ship in 2002 with XP Home installed and it was more than usable at the time.

Its hard to see ‘Aero’ in its full glory in 640×480, so I can’t comment on that.

There is some cool looking stuff under control panel, the ’search’ feature to look for the icons is good, as is a little panel that tracks where you’ve been in the control panel so you can switch back to past tasks really easily.

Windows Explorer looks ood on first flush, others have commented on the virtual folders stuff, I haven’t used it enough to comment, but it looks as though its work flow has again been ‘tweeked’

Its still Beta, its still rough around the edges… and for four, five, six years effort I’m still left wondering… where’s the beef?

*Note: This is a very ‘off the cuff’ review, based on no more than a few minutes with Vista.

Saturday, April 1st, 2006 @ 8:01 am Technology
RSS 2.0 Trackback