I recently built myself a new computer, and along with the many parts I bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Basic. I thought about buying Premium but I didn’t think it was worth my money, quite frankly. For the most part, I have no complaints. I did, however, encounter the update problems many others have encountered. I was lucky that a system restore fixed the problem, but it`s still something I don`t think should have happened in the first place. While I`m on the topic of updates, I really wish Microsoft would make up it`s mind with Service Pack 1 already. It`s been ready for release for the past few weeks but Microsoft has been holding off on releasing it to the public. However, since I`m running the 64 bit version of Windows it was available to me last week. It showed up in the Updates application, but I didn’t install the update at the time. A couple of hours later it was gone, and it hasn’t shown up again since. Another point I should make about the updates application is that I’m not all that crazy about it. Maybe I’m just a bit tied to the old way of doing things, but it’s just not working for me. I’ll be the first to admit that the old way of installing updates needed a serious overhaul. OS X and the better Linux distributions (Ubuntu especially) have been eating Windows’ lunch in this area for quite a while now. The one thing I did like about it was the fact that it told you what it was going to do, and then it did it. I have encountered some times in use where I haven’t felt like it was telling me what it was planning to do, and how it was going to do it.

On another note, Vista works much, much, much better on larger monitors. My biggest complaint about XP was it’s lack of support for larger monitors. It routinely cut important windows off, things like installer applications or preference windows. Things like that aren’t acceptable in this day and age. The only thing I found to work was a little program called ResizeEnable, a program that by the authors admission is a pretty dirty hack. It didn’t always work, but it was the best solution I could find. One feature that makes being on a larger monitor much nicer is the bigger icons. No need to hack around in the DPI settings, no need to make the font sizes bigger. Right out of the box it scales itself to the monitor.

As for negatives, it takes quite to start up. I don’t quite see how I’m gaining anything for all the time it takes to load up. Thankfully, once it’s loaded in my experience it’s quite snappy, about as much as XP. Another thing I’m not so enamored with is the new start menu. I’ve never been a fan of anything other than the good old fashioned Windows 95 start menu to be honest, and I routinely change the setting if it’s not changed already on whatever computer I happen to be working on. The search box inside the menu is a good idea, but I always know the name of the program I want to run, so I’m not really gaining anything. As far as search is concerned, it’s another good idea, but is not executed nearly as well as Spotlight in OS X.

In summary, given hardware good enough to run it, there’s really nothing wrong with Vista. There are things I think could have been done better, but they aren’t big enough to be annoying. In the bigger picture I’d love to be able to put Linux on it, but alas, things just aren’t that way in the marketplace. I intend to game on this machine, and the games I want to play aren’t on Linux. Hopefully that will change, soon.