In my First Vista Experience blog, I didn’t like it. Having spend more time with it I must admit that my feeling for it has softened a bit.

Firstly – it looks great. Nearly as cool as Mac OS X. The “popping” animated windows/dialogboxes takes a bit of time getting used to, but the technology is actually rather useful when the OS needs to get your attention. Some of the out-of-the-box settings are rather annoying. But after having added a menu to the explorer and and turned off thumbnails in the explorer becomes a bit more useful and fast enough for normal usage.

Turning off the User Account Control stops the system from asking you permission all the time. So we are back with nearly the same level of application/user security as XP. Which is nice from a user perspective, but I would have liked a bit more granularity. Like keeping it on, but turning it off for a set of applications/files. Like the firewall, which works on a per application level.

Our applications all seem to work now – we have a bit more issues with low privileges users than we have under XP, but our total building system now works under Vista and the latest Beta Release Candidate has actually been build on my Vista box.

I allowed it to install the latest downloads and suddenly I had “Gadgets” (same as Yahoo Widgets or Google Gadgets). Seems nice, looks good, fast and doesn’t take to much memory compared to Yahoo Widgets. Seems to have a large set of gadgets.

I’ve been installing some basic applications to make it a bit more useful:

• WinAmp. V5.32 I stream my music from my Sqeezebox server. Works just fine, except that it dies with a Windoes message once in a while. Just a couple of times a day, so nothing major.
• Firefox. v.2.0.0.1 works like a charm, and I’m actually writing this in it.
• OpenOffice 2.1 – Haven’t used it much, but it seems to work.
• GIMP 2.2. Works just fine. Haven’t used it much, just grapped a couple screen shot of the clipboard and saved them as png.
• ConTEXT 0.98.5. My “simple” text editor. Works fine.

I want to install Thunderbird, but as I will not have my mail in clear text, I need to have either TrueCrypt works or investigate how the build in hard drive encryption works.

Some fairly normal application, (for a developmer) like telnet is not available out of the box and you have to “turn them on”. Here’s a screen shot where I turn on telnet:

Am I going to switch my home box to Vista? No. I still haven’t found anything in there that I really need. I don’t need “Nice! Cool!”. Not enough to pay for it.