Thoughts on Windows Vista

I’ve installed Windows Vista and played around with it. Since I went from an x86 version of XP, to x64 Vista, I had to do a clean install. I was planning on it anyways, since it is an HP laptop, and there were lots of programs that were installed by default. I like to do a fresh install of Windows, so that I can be certain of what is installed and running in the background. Here are some of my first impressions.

1) You are going to need a fairly new system. Vista takes about 800MB of RAM right after logging in, so you definitely want about 1GB of memory as a minimum. I recently upgraded the laptop to 2GB of memory, because I am going to be doing Java programming soon, and the JRE takes up quite a bit of memory, or at least it seemed like it did. It was a good thing. Memory management has been changed in Vista, and it will take up as much RAM as possible for caching, and as such, as I am writing this, there is only 51MB free of RAM. In other words, Vista does a much better job at putting all the memory you can throw at it to good use.

2) Which leads to my next point, I absolutely love the Readyboost feature. With Readyboost, you can insert a flash drive, SD card, or some other type of flash memory, which Windows will use as another source to cache memory. The catch is that not all media is fast enough, so it might make sense if you are interested to check whether or not the media can work with Readyboost. I bought a SanDisk 2GB Cruzer drive this morning to try out Readyboost, and found that it is fast enough, and does seem to improve system performance. As I understand, from reading other blogs, the biggest gains are realized when you have a smaller amount of RAM, such as 512MB or 1GB, since there would be more paging.

3) I have found that my disk space seems to fluctuate wildly. I have a 60GB disk, and I have anywhere between 21-30GB of free space, which seems to vary depending on the time of day. I haven’t figured out why this is happening, but it is getting me nervous. I might have to buy a bigger drive.

4) Overall, I like the Vista interface. I do find quirks here and there, such as not being able to put the computer into sleep mode, and have it successfully come out of sleep mode. I get around this by using hibernate mode. I have to use an unsigned driver for my audio card, but everything else seems like it is working fine.