Getting to know Vista better.
I admit it, I was initially skeptical of Vista, I bought into all the negative hype surrounding it and avoided it like the plague for close to a year after it came out. Then a few months back I was building a new PC for home use and I decided I would give it a try, though I told colleagues at the time that I’d probably end up uninstalling it within a week.
Well, it’s several months later, and not only have I not uninstalled Vista, I have grown to really like it. I know my experience may not be typical, but so far Vista has given me less grief than any version of Windows I’ve worked with. The initial install went smoothly and I was pleasantly surprised to find Vista finding the correct drivers for all my hardware right away. Of course, this might have something to do with me using pretty much all-new parts that had been manufactured after Vista was released, but I can’t recall any other time in history I haven’t had to do a bunch of driver updates after the main OS install was done. Also the install process is much much faster than previous versions of windows.
My install was of the 32-bit Business edition of Vista. This is the version of Windows I suspect will be most common in Small to medium sized businesses. All in all I found it to be a very stable and dependable product. My only issue with it was that as with other 32-bit operating systems it is limited to 4GB of physical memory. I suspect this will not be a major issue in most corporate environments, except for some higher end workstations used for software development, AutoCAD etc.
In the next couple posts I will focus on some of the nice new features of Vista that will make life easier for techs and sysadmins. I will not be discussing the more widely discussed features of Vista like the UAC, Aero etc, but rather focus on the things most of us may not be aware of, but which will make administration easier.
Stay tuned
Adventures of an IT Generalist 
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