Vista Test Drive

After all the reports that Vista RC1 is stable I decided to give it a test drive.

I swapped out my hard drive in my notebook and put in a spare 30GB drive that I had a previous Vista Beta on. About 40 minutes later I was up and running. First minor problem was my display driver wasn't set right. I am now running at 1400 x 1050 as I can't find a driver for 1600 x 1050..so a bit of empty space. Not the end of the world.

So here's what happened

1) My graphics card isn't good enough. I can't run all the cool Aero stuff. I got a rating of 1.
2) Vista is really snappy. It boots up fast and things just work out of the box
3). I installed Skype, then went after some desktop Gadgets:
Wikipedia search, remote desktop gadget, simple calendar, analogue clock, weather, cpu gauge, USD to NZD convertor and a simple notepad.
4)Next up was Google Desktop. Nothing beats ctrl+ctrl.....well maybe vista does. I can now just press the Windows key and start typing. I'll try both
5)I thought I may as well try the latest version of Open office so downloaded that and installed in lightning time.
6) I installed G Drive...a nifty liitle tool that gives you access to your 2GB space on Gmail...right on your desktop.

Everything is running really sweet.. IE 7 seems to be really snappy on vista.

And I've installed Windows Live Mail...so i can check both work email and gmail on the one screen. Haven't worked out how to check gmail yet...wasn't as easy as I thought :)

First impressions are really good of vista though.