Microsoft Windows Vista Business

Introduction:

Well love it or hate it Microsoft's new operating system, is starting to get a foothold on everyday computers now. Since support for XP is going pretty much stop now, and Vista is due to become standard, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.

You may be wondering why I have business edition. Well I'm a student, doing a Software Engineering course, my university is part of Microsoft's Academic Alliance. This ...
...Visual Studio 2005 etc. Vista Business was the only version I'm allowed. If you can do this, I would, it's a great and little known way of getting free and legitimate software. This review is designed for normal users, I'm not going to go into memory management or other deeper issues.

Recommend Requirements:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least ... more

Introduction:

Well love it or hate it Microsoft's new operating system, is starting to get a foothold on everyday computers now. Since support for XP is going pretty much stop now, and Vista is due to become standard, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.

You may be wondering why I have business edition. Well I'm a student, doing a Software Engineering course, my university is part of Microsoft's Academic Alliance. This allows me to freely download certain software, such as Vista, Visual Studio 2005 etc. Vista Business was the only version I'm allowed. If you can do this, I would, it's a great and little known way of getting free and legitimate software. This review is designed for normal users, I'm not going to go into memory management or other deeper issues.

Recommend Requirements:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics

My PC spec is:

Pentium Dual Core @ 2.13 GHz
2 GB RAM
ATI X1650 Pro Graphics Card

My PC is quite a bit over the recommended spec, so as you'd expect it has no trouble running Vista Business. My house mate may be adding vista to his PC soon; his PC is closer to the recommended spec. If there are any problems with it I'll edit this review and say what's up with it.

First Impressions:

My First thoughts on this were how good it looked, windows have transparent look to them, and the contents of the windows behind the active one are blurred. There are also resizing effects, when the windows are minimised or maximised. Switching between windows has also been vista'd up, now when you click a button near the start button you get a 3D view of the windows that are open, you can then click on the window you want. This is incredibly clever, since the 3d windows actually update like they would if they were being viewed normally, so if you're copying a file you can still see the progress bar moving in this view.

Despite all of these fancy bells and whistles my pc doesn't feel any slower, although since its doing more graphical work now the temperature has raised slightly, something to watch out for if your PC already runs hot. The layout of window controls has changed somewhat now, instead of having the normal, File, Edit, View, etc menus at the top of the window, there are now a couple of different menu's underneath the address bar.

These new menu's are cleaver in that they scan the directory you are in and place relevant menu's underneath the address bar, so for example if you are in a directory with music in it, a play all button will appear. First off I had a little trouble with this new layout as I had been used to XP for the past few years, but now I am fluent in using it I think that it's much better.

I have been using this operating system now for about 2 weeks, below are the main good and bad points I've found:

Good Things:

- The Way it looks (see above)

- Searching:
The Start menu is in a different style this time, one big, and very useful addition is that there is a search bar at the bottom of it. This makes it so fast to find things in the menu. Just type part of the name of the thing you're looking for, like "not" will find notepad for you and add it to the start menu, click it and it loads up. This is so useful if you're like me and have a lot of software. This is also a godsend because of a problem with the start menu (covered later).

-Gadgets:
How they get away with these things I don't know, this is a blatant copy of the Mac OS Widgets. However this still a good thing. They allow you to put a clock, notes, the weather in your area and other such things onto the desktop, people have already started making their own, so you'll be able to download new ones too.

-Compatibility
Despite what you may have heard/read about Vista, it is still quite compatible with oldish software, if you know what's what. The following is a list of stuff that I have got running on Vista:

-Office 2003
-Firefox 2
-Visual Studio 2005
-PhotoShop CS
-Motherboard Monitor 5
-BitTorrent
-Daemon Tools
-Direct X SDK (Feb Addition)
-Nero 7
-Win Amp
-WinRAR

Tip 1:

When I 1st tried to install Office, I got an error message stating "Software needs to elevated", after a bit of swearing I found a way around this. Simply explore the CD so that you can see the files inside it, and run the needed setup file directly by double clicking it. For some reason there's a problem when you try to run the setup from the disks menu.

Tip 2:

If you have installed something that did work on XP but won't run on Vista, you need to change the compatibility mode that the program is run in. Do this by going to the .exe file of the application that won't run and right click on it, select properties from the menu. In the window that opens click on the compatibility tab and click on the box next to "run this program in compatibility mode for:" From the drop down menu below it which is now active, select "windows XP (service pack 2)". The program should hopefully now run.

Tip 3:

Some stuff needs to be patched, such as Visual Studio 2005, go to the manufacturers website for that stuff.

-Installation
This was so fast to install on my PC, it must have only taken about 40 Minutes, which I was quite impressed with. It asked very few questions and got on with it. Within about an hour I had found and installed all the drivers I needed.

Bad Things:

-The start menu
As I mentioned above there is a problem with this, and that is that its mind numbingly slow, I wouldn't say that I have a lot of software on the PC yet, but it still takes a couple of seconds to open up a folder in the list to see the application shortcuts inside. Thank god the search feature is so quick.

-MediaPlayer
I can't for the life of me understand why I am unable to get this to do what I want with playlists, every time I change something, it mess's something else up, all I want is one play list with all my music on it in Alphabetical order of artist, but media player has its own ideas about which letters of the alphabet come in what order. So screw using this and download WinAmp I'd say.

-Security
In an attempt (and that's all it'll be) to make windows more secure the Windows Security feature pops up every time you want to install, download or change something. And this is quite annoying, you may be able to switch this off but you might loose all of your security protection, which is not desirable.

-Vista Issues
You need to be aware that there are still some teething problems with Vista on certain machines. Before you attempt an upgrade you need to be sure that your PC is compatible. Have heard of some errors where if you have many SATA hard drives or partitions then the install doesn't run correctly, to insure that this didn't happen on my pc I disconnected my 2nd hard drive and ran the installation. I had no troubles with my install, even though my motherboard is said to have the issue above.

Overall:

This is a very nice to use and efficient operating system. It didn't take me too long to learn how to use it quickly, despite me being used to other operating systems. Also even though i've been messing about with settings and programming on it, it hasn't once crashed on me, any time anything becomes unresponsive, it lets me deal with it in a suitable way.

The only problem with this is that it just feels like XP with a different interface and I probably wouldn't have been interested if I couldn't get it for free. Not a necessary upgrade yet, but if you can, you might as well.
 

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