Sunday, January 28, 2007

Vista hype nears crescendo

Vista is less than 2 days away from its release to the general public, and the hype is building to a climax. The various Vista news groups are seeing a lot of activity as people are already starting to get their hands on Vista and asking lots of questions. My local CompUSA store will open its doors at 10 PM tomorrow night to start selling Vista, Office 2007 and discounted merchandise at midnight.

I checked the various store ads but I didn't really see any bargains. Most discounts are tied to purchase of Vista or Office 2007, and I wonder whether some of the software which will be given away for "free" with purchase of Vista will actually work in Vista. We'll see how this launch compares with the launch of Windows 95, NT and XP.

I was one of the faithful waiting to get my hands on Vista. It is a good operating system based on my experience with it to date. I will withhold judgement on whether it is a great operating system just yet. I would be much more positive about Vista if more working device drivers were available, but that's the way it is with the early adoption of any operating system.

There are some bright spots in the driver scene. I was pleasantly surprised to see Nokia support Vista early on with their PC Suite which allowed me to synch my Nokia 6682 mobile phone with Vista Ultimate x64.

Another bright spot is Vista support for networked printers "out of the box." I was able to connect both Blackbird and Nighthawk to my HP 952C Deskjet printer attached to a Netgear Print Server PS110. I simply pointed Vista Ultimate x64 to its static TCP/IP address on my network and specified it as a "generic 2-port print server" and selected the printer as the HP 952C Deskjet printer on Port 1. It was very easy and painless.

Actually, networking is very simple with Vista, in general. Setting up file sharing with Vista is easy.

I will be waiting for the release of the NVIDIA driver for my BFG 8800GTS graphics card on Vista launch date (January 30, 2007) before proceeding with the rest of my discovery and testing on Nighthawk.

My wife was recently provided with a Core 2 Duo laptop for use at home by her work, so I might be able to keep Nighthawk permanently for my own use for more experimentation. We shall see.

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