Well, rather than rant and rave about Vista (as I would have done in the past) I loaded it up. I installed a copy of Vista Business edition in a virtual machine. I’m running Parallels Desktop for Mac on my MacBook. It was a painless install. The vm set aside 16GB of space and ran without a hitch with 512MB of memory assigned to it. So far so good.

Now, my first impression when I ran Vista was “wow, cool”. Sadly, that faded in short order. I have used every iteration of the Microsoft operating platforms at one point or another and this one is, without a doubt, the best offering so far. That being said there isn’t all that much to write home about from a user perspective. I feel more love from SuSE or Ubuntu linux distros. I haven’t really gone anywhere near tackling the security aspects. I was solely focused on the “user” experience. Now, I must admit that I’m forever tainted in my perspective as I’m a reborn Mac disciple. The Vista layout takes a little getting used to but, that passess quickly. It is laid out in a fashion that is better than previous versions and it is fairly user friendly from a Joe User point of view. But, I found myself getting increasingly more and more frustrated as I attempted to preform relatively simple tasks that are just intuitive on my current OS of choice.

Now, IE 7, well there is just no pretty way to put it. It just blows. I recently upgraded to Firefox 2.0 on my Mac and I decided to see how the IE7 was by comparison. I was struck by the similarities (on the surface anyway) between the browsers. But, the similarities ended there. It was not a pleasurable experience. Why? Try it for yourself is the only real answer I can provide. The web pages, on the other hand, render quicker than in IE6. That was a nice change. But, the constant interference from the pop-up blocker drove me rather batty. It was identifying content on Microsoft’s own site as potentially malicious. I wish I had grabbed a screen capture of that one. Alas, I did not.

Now, from a user perspective (that’s all) I’m not overly thrilled. And I will leave my post at that as I don’t have a great deal more positive to share. But, I am biased. I would say that any Microsoft user that has never ventured outside the Redmond box will absolutely love Vista. Step away from the Koolaid. But, for anyone who has wanted something better, keep looking.

Tags: Microsoft Vista, Vista Business, MacBook, IE7 vs FF2, Vista User Experience