Windows Vista

So I spoilt myself with a brand new laptop. Being into web development, I have been warned by my fellow developers to steer clear of Windows Vista.
My new laptop came with Vista, but I had the option to change it to XP. I thought, what the hell lets take the plunge. Eventually everyone will upgrade anyway. Being a designer and developer, my greatest concern was for software compatability.
First things first. Having heard that Vista is quite power hungry, I made sure I had a minimum of 2 gigabytes of RAM.

So far I have been quite impressed. I am glad I did go for the 2 gigs RAM. I am actually considering upgrading to 4 gigs, however I think for the average end-user, 2 gigs should be quite sufficient.

Yes, in a way it is quite similar to XP. Things have been moved around quite a bit. Once I found where everything has been moved to it was not too hard to setup. I am running the Business Edition. Lets just say I like to force the OS to do my bidding, which is not so easy with the Home Edition.

I have found switching between applications to be quite a charm. Then again, that might be just because I got quite a powerful machine. The 3D windows switcher is quite charming, even though in functionality it’s not much different from the normal ALT + TAB trick.
What is quite a nice feature is the live preview when mousing over the tabs in your taskbar.

The only problem I have experienced so far and still have not found a solution to is that my cellphone won’t wortk on Vista. I have tried all kinds of different drivers and none work. I have even contacted the Motorola support staff as well as the developers of their software, Avanquest, but have just run into a dead end. I can count on my fingers though the amount of times I have had to use my 3G so hopefully an answer will popup before I run into the urgent need for it.

Over all. I am quite impressed with Vista. Developing in PHP and MySQL, I haven’t run into issues yet. That said, my server is set up on a desktop machine, so I cannot vouch for an actual Apache, PHP and MySQL setup running on Vista.
All my designing software worked from the word go without a single hiccup.
I have run into a few small bugs, but I am sure they will all be sorted out in the first Service Pack.

So don’t be put off by all the critics. Take the plunge, you’re going to have to in due course anyway.

In: Rants & Raves

Tags: MySQL, php, web design, Web Designer, web developer, windows vista