Vista, First Impressions

Best Buy has a Seagate 120GB hard drive on sale for $50 -- with no rebate nonsense -- so I decided I'd pick one up to throw Vista on. Read on for some of my first impressions.

The installer was a bit lame. I booted off the DVD I'd burned and it installed ok. But when it came to reboot, it booted off the DVD again and wanted to start the install again. I'm not sure if that's just because of my particular PC's BIOS settings, but from when I've done XP installs, I seem to recall it managing to reboot to the hard drive without issues. They could at least add a message saying to remove the DVD before rebooting, since it isn't needed after reboot anyway.

My video card is weak (64MB GeForce4 MX 440) so I can only use the Vista Basic theme. So no Aero for me. Do get at least some of the new effects though. The pulsing blue default button reminds me a lot of Mac OS X. But I do think the new progress bar effect is pretty neat. In programs that support it correctly, anyway. Firefox doesn't. Window borders for non-maximized windows are too big and take up too much space.

The sideways folder icon is silly.

Since I have separate Vista and XP installations, it would be nice if Vista could still recognize and use the apps I have installed in my XP partition, so I don't have to reinstall stuff to use under Vista.

IE7 has tabs. Nice. Firefox was still the first program I downloaded and installed.