I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Windows Vista a few months ago through the PowerTogether campaign launched by Microsoft in an effort to show how well Vista worked with Microsoft Office 2007. 2 Months later, I will give you my take on the newest operating system from Microsoft.

IT is my job. Its what I do day in and day out. Support users, maintain servers, and watch YouTube all day. Most of the servers and computers I work with are Windows based. We have a few that are not, such as the OpenVMS and the AlphaServer sitting behind me. Around here I get a lot of questions about Windows Vista and if its worth getting.

Well thats a tough question to answer. Do I like it? Certainly. I think it runs smoothly and the graphical user interface truly is graphical. The colors and the graphics are aesthetically pleasing. The animations are smooth and crisp. I love them. Things run as they should on my 1.8GHz Sempron based laptop with 768MB of PC2100 RAM. Its a low end Compaq laptop that only cost me about $500.

My installation was a fresh one. I decided to perform a clean install so that I could get a fresh copy of Windows running without inheriting any problems from the old Windows XP installation. I recommend anyone thinking about Vista to do the same. Consider it Spring cleaning.

I also installed Vista on another Compaq laptop that runs a 64-Bit 2.0GHz AMD Turion CPU with only 512MB of RAM. This one was an upgrade from Windows XP. Let me tell you - it runs terribly. I don’t know if its the lack of RAM or the fact that we upgraded from XP, but the end result is a system that runs too slow to do anything.

I considered installing Vista on my desktop, which is much more powerful than my laptop because I wanted to see how much better it would run, but I have certain applications installed that will not work with Vista. My only options are to either run Vista as a virtual machine with VMWare, do a dual boot, or buy a USB hard drive and install Vista on that and only boot to it when I want to.

Take a look at the sweetness that Microsoft calls Aero. Its beautiful. The default theme is very pleasing to the eyes and the makeover is over due. Prior to Windows Vista, the Windows design has barely changed much since Windows 95.

Like to Alt-Tab much? Then this is for you.

Now, enough about the performance (or lack thereof), lets talk about the features. As you have all read in some more detailed reports, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into developing this new OS and it is sure to confuse everyone.

The first thing I noticed is the User Access Control feature that comes turned on by default. Its part of Microsoft’s security initiative. Basically, this feature doesn’t allow you to install anything, change anything, or mess anything up without first prompting you to allow such an action. Its nice, especially from an IT point of view. This feature has the power to prevent accidental changes to system settings and accidental installation of software. It also gets annoying. I know what I am doing, so I don’t need to be prompted every time I try to change a system setting. I had to turn this off completely, but I would recommend that most people leave it enabled.

The next thing I noticed is the Windows Sidebar. Its pretty neat. It gives you different gadgets to install on the sidebar that do different things. It is a lot like the Yahoo! Widget Engine or the Apple Dashboard so its nothing ground breaking, but it brings nice features to the masses. In fact, rumor has it that this feature was released in beta versions of Vista before Apple or Yahoo! released theirs. Anyway, it lets you install widgets to do all sorts of things such as show the weather, world time, a slide show from My Pictures, a calendar, system performance as well as a ton of others, and I am sure that there will be more to come from the community.

I also love the new Photo Gallery program. It loads up quickly and lets me organize my digital photo albums without much work. This is something that my mother will love. The ability to organize her thousands of photos is something she has been needing for a long time. It even has some simple photo editing features to touch up photos. Definitely a welcome application.

Windows Media Player 11 is also nice. I think they improved the speed of WMP with version 11 and the sleek looking application fits in with the Windows Vista design perfectly. I am a big fan of VLC Media Player for its simplicity but I am starting to like WMP once again. Only time will tell if WMP can stand up against some of the many lightweight media players available.

I am also a web developer so the inclusion of IIS7 is welcomed as well. The only problem is that I am using some ISAPI extensions that are not compatible with IIS7 so I cant even use it yet.

My favorite feature so far is the ability to control the volume of individual applications independent of one another. What I mean is that Vista now allows you to mute, lets say AIM and Internet Explorer, while leaving the volume on for Winamp. Its great, because there are too many apps that play sounds when you don’t want them to and it annoys the hell out of me and many other people. This is a much needed feature.

It could just be me, but it seems that my laptop lasts longer on its battery than it did on Windows XP. It could just be that Vista has better drivers for the CPU, allowing it to throttle down better than XP did, or it could just be wishful thinking. In any case, my laptop lasts for a few hours now.

Now for those of you who are thinking about trying Vista - be warned that it is not simple - especially the networking. I have been trying to figure out all the shortcuts to different things and the networking is the most confusing to me. They made it more secure and more powerful and I guess the downside to those two great things is that they made it more difficult to configure. Whether wired or wireless, configuring your NIC is not as easy as going to Network Connections and selecting Properties of the specific NIC. In fact, at this time I still haven’t found the easiest way to do it.

I haven’t played any games on it because my laptop has a shitty integrated graphics chip which certainly couldn’t handle Vista’s DirectX 10. I am curious to hear other peoples opinions and I definitely want to know how well Vista runs on your computers, and of course the specs of said computers.

Let me know what you guys all think about Vista and its performance.
(Mac fanboys need not respond)