Karl and Angela Rees

I downloaded the beta version of Windows Vista this week. It was a huge download--3.2GB. After a few unsuccesful tries at intsallation (it froze up about mid-way through), I took all the peripherals out of the computer and managed to get it to install. And it continued to work fine after I installed the peripherals again. I was impressed that when it sensed an unsuccesful install, it rolled everything back to the way things were.

Overall, the interface is pretty slick. Not as revolutionary as I was expecting, though. It has IE7 on it, but that's nothing new because I've been using IE7 beta for a while now (I highly recommend IE7, by the way--it's easily on par with Firefox, and has a head start on C33 3.0). There was also a new version of Windows Media player, which added a few interesting features. The Sidebar feature is a good attempt at competing with Yahoo Widgets or Google Desktop. The collaboration tools and speech recognition look fairly interesting as well. What I like most is Media Center--I'm not sure if its better than MCE 2005, because I've never played with it before. But the interface is really slick. Much better than Meedio or Yahoo Go TV. Unfortunately, it's not able to change the channels on our digital cable settop box via a serial cable connection, so I'll be sticking with Meedio for the time being.

Anyway, it's fun to play around with. There's a lot of stuff I haven't looked at yet. Were it not for the fact that the beta version expires next June, I might even be willing to switch it permenantly.

Update: 10/01/2006

I've switched over to Vista RC1 permenantly on our living room PC. Media Center works very well, especially with the addition of plugins for RSS feeds and GamesEX (for Nintendo, SNES, etc.). I also enjoy the new Moviemaker and DVD Maker. Much easier to use than the elaborate setup I used to go through to convert all our videos into the right formats.

The only major problem I've had is my computer's a little outdated. So it's slower than I'd like, and there aren't any native ATI drivers for my card (had to install the XP ones instead), and the drivers for my sound card are in beta so my microphone doesn't work. I suppose that will get fixed soon.