Cancer Guy

vs

Vista Vista Vista. The “Wow” starts now. I watched Windows Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office LIVE Webcast on Jan 29th 2007. It was a little boring because I already know most of what they were showing us and was looking forward to trying it out. Today, I managed to get a copy of Vista Business and decided to installed it. Here’s my experience. My machine is a simple Dell E521 (AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive). There are 4 partitions on the hard drive. First is installed with Windows XP, second and third Ubuntu and swap space, and fourth is empty. Basically the machine already have dual boot with Windows XP and Ubuntu. On the webcast, they claim Vista can be installed in 15 minutes. My installation took about 18 minutes. However, from there to actual login, it took another 12 minutes. There are some things to set such as date, clock, keyboard, language and then there’s some sort of optimization. Still, the time to install is much better than previous Windows. Once logged in, there’s the obvious new Aero UI, transparency, rotational windows switcher. There’s also the sidebar on the right hand side, which allows you to add gadgets such as calendar, clock, photo switcher, weather, notes taker, currency exchange, etc. For people who are running older version of Windows, you can get a sidebar too by using this sidebar software from desktopsidebar.com. All these things are great, but I have seen/used them like 10+ years ago on Unix/Linux systems. I wonder why it took so long for them to get on Windows… Another thing that’s lacking is the virtual desktop. I multi-task alot and it really helps when I can have a separate desktop for each project I am working on. It’s less cluttered. There is a virtual desktop powertoy from Microsoft, but it’s not supported. I have tried it, it’s not very stable. Instead I use VirtuaWin, it works great! I really think Microsoft should seriously consider making the virtual desktop powertoy better and incorporating it in the OS just like Linux. I have Ubuntu on the system, it does everything that I needed to do. I can’t wait for Ubuntu version 7.04 Feisty Fawn to come out with either Beryl or Compiz windows manager included by default. So I was gonna boot to Ubuntu to do something and guess what, after Vista shuts down and system starts to boot, I only see boot menus for Vista and XP. Vista killed the ubuntu bootloader and only keeping Vista and XP. I couldn’t believe it… So for people who have Ubuntu, don’t install Vista unless you know how to get Ubuntu back. (I really shouldn’t be stressed over this, it’s only been 3 weeks since my liver surgery…)

update: I went to ubuntu.com to search the forum and found the instructions on how to restore grub. A step-by-step article with screen shots on how to install Vista with linux and reconfigure dual boot. A wiki on how to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 @ 3:17 pm on the category General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.