Vista: Day One

The Vista install went very smoothly yesterday on my work laptop. It's mostly working... so far.

The Aero Glass interface is quite nice and the new default system font is very pleasant to look at. The sidebar is reproducing the gadgets I've previously played with using Yahoo! Widgets and the Google Desktop sidebar. I like the window opening and closing fade effect, but the frosted glass window frame is not very useful.

Adding a networked printer was extremely easy - clicking the Add Printer button presented a list of network printers, I selected the one I wanted and it automatically installed the correct driver. No need to scroll through long lists of drivers, although I'm disappointed that the printer selection window size cannot be changed and I have to scroll through a list in a tiny window when I have acres of screen space that could be used.

Things that aren't currently working: Palm HotSync and Yahoo! Intellisync. The Palm is supposed to work, so I'll have to do some digging.

One comment must be made about the UAC. It's actually not that bad. I'm running as a non-administrative user and so UAC keeps prompting me for an administrators password whenever it wants to perform a privileged operation. I believe that if you're already an administrator it simply pops up the infamous allow/deny box without requiring a password.

To be honest, having installed a bundle of software packages, it's not that bad. There is no caching of the password that you find on Linux, but then Vista is likely to be a more vulnerable target by the black hats. Of course, many users will blindly click Allow, but at least UAC is a start.

At the end of day one, it's a pretty positive experience. Onto day two...