First hour experience with Vista Home Premium |
Inevitable this week that we would be buying into Vista in some form or another. We weighed the options of upgrading an existing machine versus buying a new one with Vista already on it and made a decision last night. We brought home the Gateway GT5405E from Costco with the following specs:
19″ Wide LCD flat panel 1440 x 900 max resolution
Intel Pentium dual core 2.8 GHz, 800 MHz FSB 2×1 MB L2 Cache
Vista Home Premium
1024 MB DDR2 RAM
250 GB SATA II 7200 RPM with 8MB Cache hard drive
DVD+RW double layer
Ethernet
6 USB, 15-in-1 memory card reader
USB amplified speakers
6-Channel 5.1 High Defintion audio
Modem
A bunch of crap installed software
$779 USD + tax
One thing I noticed and mentioned in a Hmmcast earlier this week is that we didn’t see any computers, even the really high end ones, with Vista Ultimate preinstalled. When I looked at the price of buying Vista Ultimate, adding memory, hard disk space plus the time spent doing the upgrade, it seemed a wiser use of my resources buying a new computer with Vista already installed. I’m bummed that Ultimate wasn’t an option but Vista Premium has everything except the advanced business backup features, business networking and BitLocker drive encryption. Will probably upgrade to Ultimate later.
What follows are my thoughts and reactions to the first hour of the new Vista Home Premium experience. For newer readers I intentionally didn’t do any Vista beta testing and tried to stay away from reading long, descriptive reviews of the beta by others. The machine is located in our bedroom not in one of our offices, so I’m not even writing this post on the Vista-powered machine.
Ok, let’s break out that razor blade and see what’s in the box.
Unboxing
I like how Gateway boxes their machines. Everything is packed neatly and contains an easy to setup step-by-step guide. Even though I’ve setup many, many computers I still look through these guides first and make sure there isn’t some special step I need to be concerned about. Nothing new here except I found it interesting the mouse included was USB-based. First computer we’ve ever bought where they packed in a USB mouse. That seemed a bit odd to me, but oh well. USB powered speakers too was a bit different.
While I unboxed and hooked up the computer and monitor, my wife built a cheap desk we bought at Wal-Mart. Here’s how it looks in the corner of the room:
Powering up
The first thing I noticed, to my disappointment, was that you couldn’t just power it on and get going, it needed to go through a fairly long first time startup cycle. I didn’t note how much time, but it had to be at least 15 minutes. When I got my Tablet PC in 2004 this was one of the things that really impressed me. That I could just turn it on and get going. Not the case with this machine.
I didn’t have to enter in serial numbers or anything like that but did have some basic setup information like setting up an administrator account. That part was fine and went quickly and smoothly but it needed to reboot at least once and go through a setup process.
WiFi plug and pray
Since this was being setup in the bedroom where we had no LAN, I needed to use a Linksys wireless adapter. I was anxious to see if plug and pray would have the necessary drivers for a fairly common wireless adapter:
No dice. I hunted down the driver CD and installed but then the thought crossed my mind: what if the XP drivers didn’t work with Vista? Fortunately they did.
Worked long enough to download a Vista update that required rebooting. As soon as I rebooted, the Linksys WiFi adapter didn’t work any more and a new message appeared telling me I needed to download and install an updated driver. Doh!
With some fiddling around in the network settings I was able to get the connection to work so I could actually use Windows update but the process but I could imagine somebody not very computer experienced reaching for Gateway or Linksys tech support already. The new Vista interface is still similar enough to XP that I could figure out where to go (”Network”) including the new “Connect to” section which I need to learn more about.
I like how Windows update knew where to go and get the Linksys driver and didn’t shuttle me off to Google. One of the preinstalled programs was Google desktop and the default search wasn’t Live.com in Internet Explorer, it was Google. I’m sure that’s some deal Gateway made with Google, but was impressed that no Microsoft.com pages appeared on first opening of IE. Didn’t expect that. Nice.
Firefox wasn’t installed though, so I’ll need to do that later.
Uninstall the preinstalls
After getting the internet connection and browser running my first move was to deal with the overactive system tray; start uninstalling preinstalled programs.
AOL was there like the crazy cousin you can never get rid of and a few trial editions like Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition (60 day) and Microsoft Digital Image Starter Edition (60 day). No need for Office since we already have Office Pro 2007.
The uinstall process is still in Control Panel and again has had a nice design facelift. It wasn’t a problem figuring out how to uninstall a few programs and some required reboot. I still have more programs to delete.
Damn you Fox and CBS
As it was starting to get late, we wanted to finish watching the most recent episode of 24 on the new Vista powered machine but we’re denied by a message from Fox On Demand that said “we don’t support the Vista operating system yet.” Also tried CBS Innertube and the video just never went past the “buffering” message.
I set a screensaver for 10 minutes by right clicking on the desktop just like you do on XP. I like the Aero glass window effects and moving things around. I took a quick peek at the new games message but didn’t actually play anything. Looking at the clock, my hour was up.
Did the “Wow” start within the first hour?
Microsoft’s marketing slogan is The “Wow” starts now and based on my first hour customer experience, I’d say it wasn’t so much “wow” for me as it was “O…k.”
If I had installed with a ethernet instead of going wireless it would have been less hassle I’m sure, but the fact that Vista needed to update itself when it just launched Tuesday and required a 10+ minute initial update and multiple reboots put me off a bit. Maybe that’s more Gateway’s fault (?)
An hour isn’t even remotely fair time to evaluate an operating system as a whole, so don’t take my first hour thoughts as condemnation for Windows Vista. I’ll be writing about Vista in more detail in the coming days, weeks and months as I learn more about it and how it works compared to other OS.
Initial overall thought: sure a lot of eye candy. Microsoft has clearly looked at what Apple does and is trying to emulate. Just looking at the packaging for the Windows Vista boxes and you’ll see they are paying more attention to design details. I noticed this with the Zune too.
As noted yesterday I’m usually more nuts and bolts oriented than into design-related stuff. The pretty stuff isn’t as important to me as system stability and reliability although you’ll note by one of the screenshots that I changed the default background.
Seriously, will Vista be more stable like my Tablet PC or less stable like my main XP Pro machine that needs reboots every other day or so? Going to take a lot more than an hour to find this out and that’s ultimately how I’ll judge Vista going forward.
If you already have Vista running, how did your first hour go? Did you beta test Vista so you knew what to expect? Anything that stood out as really cool or really lame?
Did this post make you go hmm?
(Hmm, no ratings yet)
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“a lot of eye candy” - I agree. It’s an attempt to become very Mac like. I only fiddled with my Vista Business edition for a few minutes after installing it. I ran out of time.
I agree it takes a long time to startup - even with 1GB of RAM.
I loaned my laptop running Vista to my wife this morning. She needed it at work. Attaching it to her network was a royal pain. It seems that MS is so trying to “dummy proof” the new OS, that I couldn’t find the manual configuration area for the NIC. I spent about 15-20 minutes going through the newer optioned control panel. I suppose I could have gone with the classic theme and would have found it quicker.
“I hunted down the driver CD and installed but then the thought crossed my mind: what if the XP drivers didn’t work with Vista? Fortunately they did.” You would think that they would make the OS work with older drivers. My guess is that most people upgrading would have older hardware/ drivers. Interestingly enough yours was a brand new machine. So - whats up with that? Why do sites like CBS and fox need special software pushes in order to run on your Vista OS !? Thats one of my biggest gripes against MS, and how they don’t play well with others.
Comment by Lestat — February 2, 2007 @ 11:03 am PST
On the FOX/CBS thing you’d think they would want the Vista experience to be more compatible out of the box than less. I’m not sure what they are doing proprietary that doesn’t work with Vista yet but it was a let down. We ended up using my six year old laptop to watch.
Comment by TDavid — February 2, 2007 @ 1:19 pm PST
[…] A week ago in the evening we brought home a new Gateway machine powered by Windows Vista Home Premium. […]
Pingback by Blogging today on the Vista machine » Make You Go Hmm — February 8, 2007 @ 3:23 pm PST
I have 1024MB of RAM on my computer and I am interested in getting Windows Vista Home Premium. How was the performance of your PC after startup?
Comment by Big Man — February 15, 2007 @ 4:54 pm PST
Big Man - haven’t had too many performance problems after startup really to date. Seems fairly stable if you don’t count the numerous video driver crash problems.
Comment by TDavid — February 15, 2007 @ 8:38 pm PST
eye candy for sure. i got vista home premium. im running an older athlon xp 2700 with 2gb memory. after roughly 2 weeks running vista, it is stable and i have installed about 10 updates. i can tell its slower than xp, but not so much that it will make me step back to xp. i think the readyboost seems to be a good feature, but i have not tried it yet, none of my flash drives are compatible. however i got some readyboost drives ordered from newegg.com and should arrive today. im anxious to see if this gives me any peformance boost. being gateway insalled all this *extra* software that you removed, did you have any problems with leftovers from the uninstall? such as invalid entries in msconfig startup? i did a clean install and removed some dvd authoring software i tried out …yet parts of it live on
….i did a defrag … this process took about an hour on my clean install of vista. xp never took that long. have you did a defrag yet and how long did it take? the only problems ive had with vista is my video capture card wont work (new one on the way) and i had problems with the windows media center having distorted sound. but an audigy driver update fixed that. so far, i love vista. i currently have it tweaked and everything updated and working flawlessly. the whole fox/cbs thing is just crazy. thats something that needs to be fixed if its not already. what score did vista give your gateway? integrated graphics?
Comment by JcT21 — February 20, 2007 @ 5:57 am PST
So I got the same model as you and two things jump out at me. I can’t burn video using MS DVD Maker and I can’t run BattleField 2142 from the DVD Drive. Not sure what the issue is here, but hopefully it sorts out.
Comment by Jimmy Alderson — March 6, 2007 @ 8:09 pm PST
Bought a new HP Pavilion computer with VISTA HOME PREMIUM pre installed. In the first couple of hours, I had a loss of data crash when an advertising nag killed my running application with no apology. The system randomly and repeatedly resets the video display colors, making older applications hard to use.
I cannot see the home network or shared printer, even though internet works fine, and the other WinXP and Linux machines on the same Ethernet router have no problem. The troubleshooting tools do not find a problem. It just doesn’t work.
When I decided to remove VISTA and install WinXP, the HP script to burn recovery disks failed to burn the disks (made six coasters) using HP media. I have been able to read and burn other DVD data disks on the same hardware with no problems. Technical support is hard to locate and unresponsive. It looks more like a virus than an operating system, so if someone offers is to you for free, RUN THE OTHER WAY - FAST.
Comment by John R. Lewis — March 11, 2007 @ 7:30 am PST
Have found Vista a nightmare. Bought new HP PC (2gb RAM, 400gb HD, Intel 6300 @ 1.86 Ghz) with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. In 4 weeks have done 4 factory re-sets. Can’t burn discs. Can’t open discs. Camcorder (Canon MVX20i)not recognised. Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker have never worked. Right from first installation get message “Windows host process (Rundll32) has stopped working”. I use dial-up internet and literally can no longer afford (being on 5th factory re-set) to download necessary downloads (including Norton Security which I never want to see again). Top notch all-in one printer (C5180) takes 2 hours to download necessary drivers -can’t afford to do this every week, on top of the drivers needed for absolutely every other thing I want to run/install. Only software managed to run on previous installations was Ulead VideoStudio 9 which also managed to burn discs - Hurrah! Bought Belkin transfer cable - transferred all documents from XP laptop, but all those settings knocked everything else out and nothing would work. HAD ENOUGH!! Now looking for high spec PC NOT running any form of Vista - any offers or information on where can obtain as now all seem to be with Vista - NO NO NO!. Love your web site name - in this case it has to be “make you go AAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!
Comment by AnnHudds — March 26, 2007 @ 1:50 pm PST
[…] I read Microsoft’s press release after reading Hmm reader Ann Hudd’s comment earlier today: Have found Vista a nightmare. Bought new HP PC (2gb RAM, 400gb HD, Intel 6300 @ 1.86 Ghz) with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. In 4 weeks have done 4 factory re-sets. Can’t burn discs. Can’t open discs. Camcorder (Canon MVX20i)not recognised. Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker have never worked. Right from first installation get message “Windows host process (Rundll32) has stopped working”. I use dial-up internet and literally can no longer afford (being on 5th factory re-set) to download necessary downloads (including Norton Security which I never want to see again). Top notch all-in one printer (C5180) takes 2 hours to download necessary drivers -can’t afford to do this every week, on top of the drivers needed for absolutely every other thing I want to run/install. Only software managed to run on previous installations was Ulead VideoStudio 9 which also managed to burn discs - Hurrah! […]
Pingback by 20 million licenses of Vista sold but how many are happy with Vista? » Make You Go Hmm — March 26, 2007 @ 7:05 pm PST
We have been testing Vista business at work and have had numerous problems, most of which are GPO and permissions related. But I purchased a new dell laptop with 2.0 dual core/667FSB/2GB DDR2 dual channel with vista home premium. So far the only problems I have had are an error message dealing with McAfee which required a McAfee update to fix, and for some reason windows media player would crash after ripping about 10 to 15 cd’s to the hard drive. Other than that things are running fairly smoothly.
Comment by Jason — March 31, 2007 @ 10:41 am PST
Windows Vista is a breeze and works better than XP in my opinion. I installed it on my old pc but since I could not use aero graphics due to the poor graphics memory of my old notebook, I bought an HP tx1000 convertible notebook with AMD Turion64 X2 and 2gb ram. I have not had a single problem with it. Sure it took about 20mins to start up the first time. What’s wrong with that? Would you rather that someone boot up your computer before you have it and set it up with a randome “user”. Advice? The first thing I did even before connecting to my home network was to uninstall Norton, connect to the internet and download AVG. Common guys we have to fair and not just look for ways to dice microsoft. My vista has never crashed. All my peripherals work and i only had to update them because I like everything updated. ofcourse windows update knew where to find the updates.
Comment by Emeka — April 3, 2007 @ 8:03 am PST
Hey there,
I have the same thing happens to me, and I am so pissed off for I cannot get to erase all that preinstalled shit on my Hp Laptop, I have the same deal. would you please guide as to how erease these stupid programs I would appreciate it. I have Vonage, Aol, eBay, Hp games which is by the way 803 MB alone. And some other things.
Best regards
Sam
Comment by Sam — April 20, 2007 @ 9:03 pm PST
[…] we bought our Gateway Vista machine in February the out of the box Windows Vista Experience Index was 2.6. Since buying Shadowrun and Halo 2 for […]
Pingback by How to raise your Windows Vista Experience Index » Make You Go Hmm — June 11, 2007 @ 4:55 pm PST
[…] owned a Windows Vista machine since February 2, 2007 (pictured above) which was unpacked and the Gateway GT5405E specs detailed. It was originally planned as a bedroom computer and backup if something should go wrong with our […]
Pingback by Being interested in 6 of 100 reasons why everyone’s so speechless about Windows Vista » Make You Go Hmm — October 23, 2007 @ 5:23 am PST
I just purchased an Acer Laptop (5520-5912) and the first thing that I noticed was that the interface keeps interrupting my sessions and program windows. I am not sure if it’s just an overactive or oversensitive touch pad or what, but it’s danged annoying
Any thoughts on how to counteract this?
Comment by Todd Rogers — December 24, 2007 @ 9:58 am PST
January 30, 2008
I purchased a Toshiba Satellite Notebook the first week of January with Vista Home Premium installed and hate it. I have dial up through Juno and have not been able to get it to work correctly. I have installed the new CD for Vista from Juno, deleted and re-installed it about 25 times and followed many, many suggestions by the Juno technicians all to no avail. I called Toshiba and they say the problem is the Juno software. I did get on the internet 3 times, but other than that I can only get e-mail very slowly. I use an external USB mouse and keyboard, both Microsoft. Help - Any suggestions?
Comment by Gloria Stanton — January 30, 2008 @ 3:03 pm PST
1.
I do not understand the Vista home premium program. Especially how to create a document that I can print.
2.I have had a DELL, in the past. I also am a survivor of a major STROKE, which resulted in 60$ of my right cerebellium being removed. Thus, I need help!!!
This program and even the computer are very new & foreign to me, thus ,the additional confusion.
While I am here, does anyone know where I could find currant P.C. lingo, talk, jargon, slang, abbreviations,icons, etc.
Contact me please if you are able to help me out in any way and thank you!!! KJ
Comment by KJ — March 8, 2008 @ 2:53 pm PST