Adventure installing and running Windows Vista Beta 5342

On May 23, 2006 after downloading about 2.8 gigabytes of the test version of Windows Vista, I burned it to a DVD disk and installed in on partition 1 of a Western Digital 10,000 RPM 36 gigabytes SATA HDD using a motherboard with a VIA KT600 chip set, a AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, 768 megabytes of RAM and a AGP 8X Radeon 9600 graphic card. Partition 1 of my HDD is about 11.8 gigbytes. Windows Vista took about half of that - 5.5 gigabytes. This is about twice that of a Windows XP installation .

The start up screen is pretty. The installation went well and was pretty simple. However there was no indication throughout the installation of which files were being copied or of how much progress was being made. The screen merely showed:

Install Windows

Installing Windows

Windows will finish installing automatically.

Your computer will restart during installation.

After a period of time the PC rebooted and the screen went totally blank for about a minute. After that the following message came up:


Please wait while Windows prepares to start
After that I was prompted with the usual questions of choosing a log in name. I heard that Windows Vista has better security than previous versions of Windows. I was disappointed, however, to find that unlike UNIX and Linux, a user can still choose a log-in name other than "root" and still have Administrator privileges. However Vista does encourage the user to add at least one more account with limited user privileges. And unlike previous versions of Windows, a limited user can install software from within the limited user account by typing in the Administrator password when prompted to do so! And so this is certainly better protection against viruses, trojans and unwanted software installations than Windows XP and Windows 2000, and is similar to what Unix users have had for 3 decades and Linux has had from the beginning. Though Microsoft itself has already recommended that even the computer administrator make a limited account for himself for normal work usage, many people do not do that because of the hassle it is to switch accounts to install more software when needed. Microsoft has finally adopted something closer to the Unix / Linux concept of security. Congratulations Microsoft!

Impressions

Windows Vista is certainly the prettiest version of Windows ever! Click on either graphic to see an enlargement:

Windows Vista IE7 screenshot

Windows Vista needs at least 512 megabytes of RAM to run well. It ran fairly fast on the 768 megabytes of RAM I had using Athlon XP 1800+. However if I were to use it on my main work PC, I would install it on a newer mother board using either the latest AMD or Intel dual core chip with at least 1 gigabyte of RAM.

I heard Windows Vista was supposed to be able to boot in only 3 seconds or so. It took much longer than that on my setup. However this could be because of the older hardware I was using and the fact that Vista is still in Beta testing stage.

Vista seems to be the most user friendly version of Windows so far. Moreover it has cool options like Parental Controls! For example the parent can set time limits for their children, block certain games, block certain actives, and block certain programs from running.

Windows Vista comes with Internet Explorer 7. I was very impressed with its speed, and its security features. It has a plishing protection feature. IE 7 also conforms closer to interpreting CSS 2 code better without the bugs of version 6! For example:

And so IE 7 seems to have finally come up to meet CSS 2 standards as set by W3C! Other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Opera have already met those standards.

However IE7 does not seem to have any CSS 3 code implemented in it yet and therefore did not show the shadow effects of my header titles on http://deeptruths.com/articles/new_life_love.html The title, "Your New Life of Love!" will show a shadow effect in CSS 3 compliant browsers. The only browser I know of that can use CSS 3 code is Konqueror which is part of KDE in Linux.

Vista did not show the files and folder in my second NTFS partition by default. I had to add it by clicking on an option in "Computer" (formerly called "My Computer". After that it showed the contents of the second partition and give it the drive letter of D.

Installing 3rd party software

I made a limited user account for myself and tried to install software. I installed SiSoftware Sandra from the web. I was prompted for to type the Administrator password when I ran the exe installation file, and it installed and ran fine. Vista aborted the installation of PGP 6.58 but then allowed it after a second attempt. It seemed to need to make a configuration change to allow the installation. One program would not install at. The installation aborted it saying that it could not find "Microsoft Data access 2.5" I downloaded and tried to install Microsoft Data access 2.5 but Vista said it already had it and would not install it. However the other program continued to balk saying that could not find Microsoft Data access 2.5 and would not proceed with the installation without it. And so I had to abort it. This is due either to a bug in Vista (still in beta testing) or the other program will need a patch to work in Vista. I think it's probably the latter.

I did not run the Product Activation in this beta version of Vista (which would have run out in 15 days if not activated) because I needed to use my HDD for other purposes after only a day, and so now Vista is completely gone from my machine.

Conclusion

If you're a Windows fan and use Windows software, I think you will appreciate Windows Vista and all its security features. If you're looking for an alternative to Windows, cannot afford to pay the price of an upgrade, like to tinker with a computer, and are looking for a solid and secure operating system, go for Fedora Core Linux as I have done.

Though Windows Vista may have more and better security features than previous versions of Windows, unless they are used correctly with a bit of knowledge and common sense, I think that security is still better on a Linux machine. No Linux user with any sense at all would ever browse the Internet or do email as a Root user with Administrator privileges, but Windows Vista users may still be inclined to do that if they don't understand the safety of working in a limited user account. But who knows? Microsoft may make yet more changes before the final version of Vista comes out in 2007.

"Some beta test!" you say, "You only tried out Vista for less than a day!" Yes, you're right. My purpose was more to test my friend's motherboard and CPU. I probably will never use Windows Vista myself. I was merely curious to see what it looked like and to know if I needed to continue to make my web pages compatible for IE 7 in the future. I'm glad to know that I don't.


Comments? Questions? Errors found on this page? Please write and share them! james @ jamesjpn.com
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