As for the Aero interface itself, it is a nice experience but nothing special. It looks visually pleasing but hasn’t really done anything to make me go "wow!" Having said that though, there are a lot of neat touches in Vista that impress me a lot. The game explorer window, which is where game shortcuts are kept, is a superb idea. I love the way cover art is automatically fetched off the internet for games, and I love the contextual options, which allow gamers to access a title’s website without even touching their web browser. I just wish I could get the cover-art preview window to stick, as it tends to vanish on occasions.
Other features that deserve a mention are folder thumbnails. I have waited ages for this feature to be properly implemented and it has finally happened. My MP3 and Photo partitions now have folder thumbnail views for folders that have MP3 or images within and looks great, not to mention the ease it gives me in finding specific media.
Performance wise, Windows Vista has been a scorcher. It blazes along at speeds that put my previous Windows XP Pro setup to shame. Vista does require 2GB of Ram to perform this fast though. Superfetch works tremendously well pre-caching portions of frequently used applications in the background and making them appear instantaneously should any be required. However, upon freshly booting Vista, Superfetch grinds the hard disk for a good couple of minutes like there’s no tomorrow. This can sometimes impair performance for the first minute after the OS has freshly booted.
It’s not all plain sailing though. Windows Vista on my machine anyway feels about as fragile Windows XP did pre-SP1. At any moment, I just feel like some random application will crash out on me thus reducing my windows reliability score. Granted, I do use many older programs that were not designed for Vista, let alone Windows XP but even XP programs can be flaky on Vista.
My Gaming experience on Vista hardly fares better either. I know I stated earlier that this PC is not a gaming machine, but there are still a few old games that I do play. For example, Real Time Strategy (RTS) games is my favourite genre, so I have Age of Empires 2 and 3 (with their expansions), as well as the recent Command & Conquer 3:Tiberium Wars all sitting on my hard disk. Now all of these games speed wise perform as good as they would on Windows XP. I have no issues on that front. However, Command & Conquer:Tiberium Wars just crashes the moment I ALT+Tab out, and lastly both C&C3 and Age of Empires 3 have sound issues, which results in lots of random crackling noises mid-game.
I know it is not my new soundcard as it has happened with my older Audigy 2 too. I have also seen other gamers reporting similar issues too. I do realise that one title crashing upon ALT+Tabbing out of it is not much of a big deal, but I am not the only person experiencing this it would seem looking at various gaming forums. The most annoying thing is that most enthusiasts do not even know what causes this yet, it could be graphics or sound drivers or even something else?
Searching with Vista is a joy to behold. Thanks to the much-improved Index feature, it now blows XP’s search completely away. Search results appear almost instantly and locating your criteria couldn’t be easier. I wish I could say the same for User Account Control, which is not an enjoyable experience. Isn’t UAC supposed to ‘learn and adapt’ to the programs that I allow through, much like a firewall would? After 3 days of repeatedly allowing the same startup programs to access the system, I gave in and ended up just switching it off. I understand that there are tweaks out there to make it less intrusive, except the average user will just reach for the disable button right away rather than go through the hassle of researching and implementing a work around.