My first experience with Windows Vista

After I bought myself a new computer – a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo PI 2682 with 1 terrabyte disk space and 4 gigabyte RAM ( OK, 32bit Windows can only address 3.25 gigabyte ) – of course it came with Windows Vista and thus I made my first experience with this shiny new ( not that new, I guess ) operating system.

The new user interface of course is elegant, but my first experiences regarding robustness and also user friendliness are not that convincing, compared to reliable Windows XP I still have on my older Sony PC.

During the first 48 hours I experienced

• a complete system freeze when I inserted a CD first time into the CD slot,
• a system freeze during a shutdown,
• several sidebar freezes

Really annoying are the thousands of questions you get asked when trying to install something: the browser, the firewall and the operating system itself are throwing questions at me again and again whether I really want to do what I already decided to do or whether I will allow ingoing or outgoing internet connections ( sometimes I get strange process names shown for these type of firewall questions and I can only guess that these processes are part of the software I am currently trying to set up ).

Even when I start the virus scanner to check a newly downloaded file I get asked whether I really want to do this.

Lifehacker published some tips recently how to overcome part of these questions.

Another annoying thing is that some web pages simply don’t show up correctly in the Microsoft browser nor in Firefox 3 beta, especially pages from google like Picasa or Google maps.

And: not everything what runs under XP will run under Vista, even tools from Microsoft won’t, like Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 which has not been tested under and does not work properly under Vista as I figured out yesterday.

It’s funny ( or not ? ) but one of the first forum entries about this Fujitsu Siemens computer I bumped into was about someone thinking about how to replace Vista with Windows XP on his box ( this posting is in German language ).
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