Windows Vista Finally Out

I've had the OEM version installed for over a week. Overclockers in the UK ship early it appears

I chose the 32 bit Ultimate as 64 bit seems to have driver issues still.

Real world experiences?

Installation - everything had drivers, job done inside 40 minutes - all my software worked other than Paint Shop Pro 9.

Running it - indexing each folder is initially a pain, but once it is done, it's done. It is RAM hungry though - I have 2gb and with a few apps open and IE7 with 10 or so tabs, I'm running at 43%.

Visually it looks polished and all shiney.

No crashes at in a week.

Sidebar is good fun - I can see some really cool innovations after a while.

Really just need a DX10 GPU and a DX10 game to make it fully worthwhile.

I've been running vista for the past few days, Ultimate to be exact.

SO far so good.

The good :

Surprisingly stable... i was expecting blue screens and such... but don't use MS released drivers, Nvidia or ATI drivers, best use those release by their own manufactorers.. (nvidia one particularly)

Graphically wise, it's very good, thoguh i don't really use the "coola Win-3D" Win-Tab, but there are some very extremely annoying extra features that i'm still trying to figure out how to disable..

1. The Allow system.. oh boy that's annoying
2. The you don't have permission system.. I'm the system admin.. what you mean i don't have permission....

Side bar is good, too bad not many gadgets are release yet, give it time.

Ultimate extras = nothing so far.. will ahve to wait for awhile before they release.. maybe over the next few days.. things like dreamscene.

System resources monitor - this is by far what i like the most. Very very useful. Can see everything.

The Bad:
Some softwares don't work well. Most of them you just need the latest version, but if you bought like Adobe 7 prof, you're out of luck coz you need ADobe 8 so you might have to buy another one..

Drivers.. they aren't optimize yet.. particular to the 64bit version, Stay with 32bit is what i'll say. Nvidia's latest driver is pretty stable, not the best as compared to XP drivers, but stable at least..

Transfering files.. i really don't like the way this works now. When you wanna move / copy a file from 1 place to another.. first it starts calculating the amoutn of time you need to do it.. (takes quite a few seconds as compared to XP) Then it transfers.. now if you're transfering big chunks of files.. like..

2 5gb files and 1 10gb files.. the progress bar doesn't go smoothly like in XP, instead it jumps from 0 progress to 25% to 50% then to 100% (according to the files)

The ugly :

Cost... it's already pretty pricy in US, here in malaysia.. rumours is Vista Ultimate cost 1k+... i'm not sure if anyone will actually be able to afford that.

System requirements, unless you have a top notch system.. don't even bother with Vista..

Conclusion, Unless you've got some spare time to set up vista and getting it running stable + pulling out a few hairs from the differences and the annoying systems.. else, wait for 3-6 months before moving on to vista.

If your system meet the recommended requirements that is why there systems are unstable. I have run Vista on my desktop since beta 1 and it has worked flawlessly. Security has been improved by a lot and I have not had any crashes EVER with Vista.

I have not experienced any stability issues in Vista until today - I was downloading several HD video samples from sky.com whilst also playing one of them and unzipping another. The OS carried on fine, but IE7 froze and there was some frenzied hdd activity which turned out to be Vista looking for causes of the problem and then subsequently asking me if I wanted to report it to MS.

XP was always pretty stable for me and so far after a week or so, Vista has been exactly the same. The response time for loading programs and the way it utlises the power of a dual core CPU is much improved.

There are some buggy sidebar gadgets out there that can start to eat up RAM after a while. On the RAM subject, if you gamed happily in XP with 2gb, I reckon you need 3gb in Vista. Recent benchmarks with the new Vista drivers today and yesterday have already shown that it can be faster than XP, but the system RAM overhead is undoubtedly higher. An extra gig over XP will do the trick I think.

There are lots of useful and common sense functions that I keep stumbling across through trial and error or reading reviews. I still think I'll be finding new things in 6 months time!

To answer your main point, Vista runs stable and certainly in 32 bit format, will be happily up and running 40 minutes later out of the box.

It would be better to get 4 instead of 3. That way, you won't be running the RAM in single channel mode.

How about 2 x 1GB and 2 x 512MB?

How about 4 X 1GB?