What's new in Vista?

I purchased a new laptop on the day of Microsoft Windows Vista's consumer release. I never ran the beta of Vista but I did read about it as the stories came down the wire. Here I present some of my impressions.

1. When you first unbox the computer and want to run it for the first time, it takes a while for it to boot up. I can't imagine what it's doing during this time. On this HP dv6226us laptop, it took about 10-15 minutes of a please wait message to get to any setup questions.

2. The disk manager is helpful in that it helps to shrink your main partition quickly without a 3rd party utility. This is helpful if you want to install linux on the same hard drive or if you just want to separate your data from your operating system and programs.

3. The default action if you hit the familiar shutdown icon is to sleep. Since I run multiple OS and sometimes need to switch, I prefer a normal shutdown or for it to ask me. I'm sure I can configure it but I've just not gotten into that yet. I've been to busy setting up Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy so I can rotate my cube of a desktop like a top.

4. It would be nice if the sidebar(OSX Dashboard clone) could be expanded...I have no idea why, I just want to.

5. There's this new concept called a Windows base score that attempts to redefine and distill performance to a single number. The different games on the system each have a minimum and recommended score to run them. I do wonder just how this is calculated and if this base score can be calculated outside of Vista.

6. The trial version of Norton that shipped with this laptop integrates surprisingly well with Vista but I am a bit puzzled. If Windows is supposed to be more secure, I wonder if I can risk running without antivirus for the reduced overhead. In some OS, I do not use any antivirus at all.

7. It looks like OSX in certain ways. Things look more glossy and shiny. This seems to be the fashion though as only relatively recently has hardware been able to render the kinds of high quality graphics that shiny things require. The other more obvious thing is that My Computer and My Documents are more tersely named Computer and Documents respectively and presented in a Mac OSX style. This is a good thing and I don't really care who came up with it first.

8. This erks me. They changed "Add/Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features". It was kinda nice that it used to be near the top in alphabetical order, but now it's further down. Guess I'll have to get used to an extra click or a little more visual scanning to get to what I want.

Well, that's all I got for now. I'm sure I'll find some more things Vista does differently as I have the opportunity of using it. Overall, it's appears to be an improvement on XP though I'm not sure it's as ground-breaking as it's been made out to be. Beryl on the other hand...OMFG.

Update: I've switched back to XP, Vista's dead! Long live XP.