Digital Home Thoughts: Running Windows Vista Ultimate

A little over a week ago, a few days before I went to CES, I installed Windows Vista Ultimate (the RTM version) on my test machine. My Shuttle SD11G5, the one that eats video cards, has been shipped back to Shuttle for repair/replacement (I'm sure Ed Bott is nodding his head at this point). I'm doing my "real" work on my 17" Fujitsu laptop, but it gave me a good excuse to put my test machine up on my desk and tear into Vista Ultimate in a big way. I've been beta testing it for over a year now, but never using it as a real platform to do real work on. I would use the test machine to poke around Vista, try a few new things, see what was different - but it wasn't until recently that I realized that in order to truly grasp a new operating system, you have to use it for hours on end.

The hardware on this machine is quite modest: a 3.2 Ghz Celeron D CPU overclocked to 3.36 Ghz, 1 GB of RAM, a 100 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, a 16x DVD burner, and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro in the AGP slot. A pretty average system, and definitely less powerful than any $999 computer you'd buy today. How would it run the finalized version of Vista I wondered? Testing on the beta it worked fairly well, but I never pushed it hard. To get started, I did a complete wipe and install of Vista Ultimate and it was a very painless - Vista recognized all of my hardware and 100% of my system was working by the time the install had completed (which has gotten much faster - I think it was finished in under 20 minutes). That really impressed me - unlike XP, which is pretty dysfunctional until you get all the right drivers installed, Vista was ready to rock. My Windows Experience Index score for the overall box is a 3.7. That means I can run the full Aero interface without trouble - the processor ranked a 4.1, the RAM was a 4.5, the graphics a 4.3, the gaming graphics a 3.7, and the hard disk a 4.9. The score is based on the lowest performing part of the equation, so the old video card I had wasn't doing me any favours. It was fast enough to allow me to experience all that Aero has to offer, which is all I wanted.

Over the next few weeks, coming off the heels of the Vista Lab and CES, I'll be talking quite a bit about Vista - what I learn as I use it, why I think it's a worthwhile upgrade (which I definitely do), and exploring solutions to problems I might encounter. A new operating system isn't easy to summarize in a few bullet points, which is why I think some people think that Vista isn't a very big deal. I hope to explain over the next few weeks why it very much is.