I finally broke down and bought a PC with the new Microsoft Vista OS this week. Now you may think that I should have been active months ago in the beta test program since I am in the business. But I didn't fall under the spell or need to start early; I am very quick to pick up new stuff and things apparently changed so often between the various beta releases that it was difficult to track anyhow. But the bottom line is that I sure wasn't going to do Bill Gates' work for him, for free! So I waited.
IAnd, so should you. My first experiences with Vista were decidedly underwhelming, not to mention the bugs and glitches.
II actually had a good PC buying experience. We decided to replace my wife's (oops - Office Manager's) PC since that was getting fairly old and the usage of it was far less critical than my PC. I drove up to Wilmington to buy one instead of building myself or ordering from one of the online companies. I found a perfectly capable HP PC with Vista Home Premium, dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 320GB HD, DVD burner, and all the usual stuff. The price for just the box was $615 but I had some certificates that brought the price down to $540. I don't think you can beat that price, and it is a fine machine. About the only thing that was minimal was the power supply, but if you don't plan on adding a lot of internal PCI cards, this won't be a problem.
IThe PC has fairly good but on-board graphics - if I ever wanted to run the full Aero/Glass desktop in the future I will probably have to buy a video card for it, but that is not an issue right now. There are two free RAM slots if I ever choose to upgrade.
IVista booted up and installed without a hitch. Now the migration of our "stuff" to the new PC started. Some programs installed and worked just fine, but not all. Our HP camera drivers and applications completely refused to install; luckily there is a work around for this as the camera appears as a drive letter and I can manually copy the files. I went to the Apple website to download the latest iTunes, and it said in very clear terms that they don't recommend upgrading to Vista until they release a new iTunes version. But having no other choice (my wife needs her tunes), I went ahead and installed the current iTunes and it seemed to work fine. As I said last week, the "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard" was useless.
II found a huge bug in the importing of messages from Outlook Express to the new Vista Mail. You cannot properly specify the folder name of the source folder - I was able to get around this by being really tricky. Of course (joking) MS has moved everything around, such as the names of folders and the format for storing email and the address book.
IMy biggest problems were in networking the new PC. Attempts to share the entire C: drive or the Users folder made all file sharing very unstable. Once networking was established, I noticed that accessing files and folders through the network was distinctly slower than with XP.
IOnce I finally get everything migrated and running, I actually got some time to use Vista. I have to tell you that I distinctly dislike the new Desktop and user interface. I really don't like the pastel color schemes and find that mouse-over highlighting and the appearance of controls such as elevator bars and sliders was more difficult to see. I left that for my wife to decide about, but I would have gone back to the XP compatible mode if it were my PC.
IThere is a lot of transparency in the new Aero desktop, but I am not sure why. I didn't see any case where the transparency made more information available to my eye, and since the transparent areas are dulled a bit (so you can determine that you are seeing through to something below) it ends up looking like the skid marks in somebody's undershorts. But transparency in certain places, such as the semi-transparent controls bar seen while playing DVDs in Windows Media Player was effective.
ISo my first exposure to Vista was mostly functional but frustrating. I recommend that you hold off until the dust settles. The rumor mill says that MS already has Service Pack 1 in the works.
I(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)