The Microsoft Windows Vista operating system

I saw a message board post that DCI Reporter (Wizards of the Coast’s tournament pairings and management software) doesn’t work on Windows Vista (which is rather impressive in and of itself, I think, especially as it’s a .NET application), and it got me to thinking: I kind of need to keep on reminding myself that Windows Vista ia actually, like, out and released. I just did some brief research and apparently it has been out for several months now. I’m not sure I’ve actually seen a copy of it running on a computer anywhere. Is Vista just unusually not being picked up by people, or is my circle of influence just unusual?

4 thoughts on “The Microsoft Windows Vista operating system

  1. I think the drivers are still gelling, even in the case of nVidia. Vista has something called a “Vista Score” that assigns a performance rating to each of the major system components – RAM, disk speed, CPU, graphics, and fifth one called Aero performance. I built a box for the in-laws using an onboard GeForce 6150 chipset, and the “Vista Score” was depressingly low, lower than score given to the contemporary Intel chipset, which the 6150 blows away in every mainstream benchmark. It was so low, I couldn’t run Aero, which was disappointing. That, and the nVidia driver kept blowing up when playing QuickTime movies. (The good news is that Vista doesn’t bluescreen when the video driver fails.)

    Earlier in April they released new NVidia drivers. That fixed the instability issues. The score is still depressingly low, but I noticed the Aero score seemed to be artificially inflated to 2.9, the minimum score needed to run Aero. My guess is that Microsoft got an earful from an angry NVidia and motherboard manufacturers.

  2. The technical staff here put a computer with Vista on display a few months ago so people could try it, but I haven’t seen anyone use Vista for real.

  3. I’ve seen people using it, but you’re right: a lot of apps don’t work on it yet. I haven’t been to a company site where they company is actively using it yet.

  4. We’ve started deploying it internally (largely because its the decision of individual consultants as to which OS they want to use), and its getting generally good reviews. It seems to like all of our software, although the toy factor is still corrupting opinions of overall usefulness. We’ll see what kind of traction it gets after SP1.

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