So I’ve started to see some press getting way down on Vista about things I haven’t experienced and decided to go and see if I could figure out what was going on. First off, let me summarize my house’s trip to vista.

• Machines
• 3 older machines
• 1 brand new nice 64 bit box
• Issues
• Memory
• Most of my machines needed a memory upgrade to be happy on vista.  Where I Couldafford it machines went to 2Gb.
• RAW photo support for my camera on 64 bit windows
• Canon was in no rush to release it and I still don’t have RAW support on 64bit (which is where I do photo stuff)
• Media Center on 64 bit
• It was either the 64bitness or trying to also use the machine as a desktop while it was a media center, but this led to a lot of crashes of media center.
• Loud machines
• Since vista supports sleep better then previous versions, I started used it for my desktops. I then started to notice the noise difference between on and off.

And while I’m at it, the BS issues that people complain about, but I don’t get the issue.

• DRM
• Everyone gripes about it and it’s the default reason people give for anything that is broken, but it probably has nothing to do with anything since I’m not aware of anyone using it’s new features yet. It’s a passive, when the application asks for it, feature not an active (lets look for violations) system.
• UAC
• When you get a okay/cancel UAC prompt, you are running as an administrator and if you weren’t you would have been asked for administrator account and password. Even when you run as administrator with UAC, you are not administrator. The prompt authorizes a process to run as true administrator. There is a reasonable amount of security value here. The main question is “Should this require administrator rights to run?” whenever you see a prompt. Frankly I don’t get prompted often, and when I do, I find it’s appropriate. The notable exception is when I want to see details of what driver is loaded for my network card or video card. The UI for viewing and setting the settings weren’t separated and so you get a prompt even when you don’t want to change anything.
• If you think UAC is annoying, the question is, what did it prompt you for that it shouldn’t have?
• It’s very amusing when people comment about UAC and get recommend another OS that does the same thing, except requires you type in a password.

Okay, so now that I have that out of the way… I’ll next write on where and what I’ve learned