UTSA sells Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate for $29–yes, not $329, but $029.  Although I got the vista update disk for my lap­top long time ago, I still decided to get my hand on this “ulti­mate” ver­sion of Microsoft’s sup­pos­edly “next-gen” oper­at­ing sys­tem.  Even though I have absolutely no need for fea­tures such as Bit­Locker Vista Ulti­mate has to offer, but oh well, it is just too cheap to let it go, lol.

For­got to men­tion, the update disk from HP (Vista Home Pre­mium) does not let me to upgrade–a clean install was required.  That was some­thing I had no wish of doing; Ulti­mate needed no exces­sive pro­ce­dures like that.  After prob­a­bly an hour and half the upgrade was com­pleted, very few soft­ware pre­sented com­pat­i­bil­ity issues that had to be uninstall/reinstall.  One of those is Avast Home; Vista, for var­i­ous true and rumored rea­sons, seem to be fine with­out an AV pro­gram, so I passed.

Open­ing up Win­dows Explorer and I saw the Dif­fer­ence.  Per-user folder is moved to a more promi­nently vis­i­ble loca­tion that needed a bit adap­ta­tion time.  It is hard to con­clude the change is for the bet­ter, but it cer­tainly is more logical–like My Pic­tures and other such fold­ers are no longer under My Doc­u­ments direc­tory.  The net­work­ing com­po­nents of XP are inte­grated into this Net­work and Shar­ing Cen­ter.  I do not see the point of doing it… really…

Now after about a week using Vista, I think rather than “dif­fer­ent” I would use the word “more”.  Much more fea­tures and options in Vista, includ­ing the infa­mous UAC.  It’s the thing that would divert most mali­cious pro­grams but also irri­tated me greatly.  The real prob­lems are the ones that have no rel­e­vant answers on the Internet–like my Win­RAR does not dis­play hard drive as des­ti­na­tions when extract­ing files… even with giv­ing Users full con­trol over both of my partitions.

Vista’s new graphic scheme is a cool achieve­ment.  I like it, really; Vista resem­bles a “mod­ern OS” in my mind.  Of course to bal­ance the sit­u­a­tion, I now have reduced per­for­mance ranged from bat­tery life to fps in 3D games.

Even with all those, it is never a loss to adapt ear­lier than later.