Review by M. A. Filippelli

The install went well. I preformed a fresh install. The machine I use is strictly for testing, I did not install this on a PC that I use daily. I installed it on a laptop that’s 1.67 ghz processor over clocked to 2 ghz it has 512 shared ram (Microsoft recomends 1 gig)other then that the laptop met all of the other suggested minimum requirements. It has the Intel 945 chipset that comes with integrated graphics Intel accelerator 950 video card.

Vista didn’t recognize an old Laserjet 4 plus network printer but neither did did XP. It is a network printer so I set it up using IP printing. My Open office ( a free office suite of applications that rivals MS Office) applications work well with Vista. Vista recognized my Canon camera. It didn’t recognize an old Omni scanner that I have and there are no drivers for it on the but which is ok because I have a Mac that I do all my photo and scanning work on.

In general Vista is slower then XP on the same machine. The search functions take longer partially because it’s doing a more complicated search. The login takes a little longer because it takes longer to load the user profile.

A breakdown of new and improved features.nThe Windows software firewall works well but still is not a replacement for a hardware firewall. Vista’s mobile computing is better then XP. The spyware is also getting better but I would still recommend lavasoft over the Vista defender spyware. The parental controls haven’t changed much since XP. Windows Meeting space worked ok but Vista has to be installed on any computer joining the meeting. Windows meeting spaces replaces net meeting. Windows photo gallery is ok but seems to have lost some functionality over Windows photo manager. Windows has a thing called Gadgets. Mac users will recognize this it’s very similar to Mac Widgets. It enables you to have applets on your desktop that will tell you the weather, sports tickers, calendars. Windows comes with a few gadgets and there are many more available on line. The Windows media center is nice. It does a good job of visualizing photo’s, videos both stored locally and over a network. Windows aero is interesting to play with but fairly useless, basically what it does is give the title bar some transparency so that you can see what’s below it.

If you are going to spend two hundred dollars on this then I would recomend spending a hundred dollars more and picking up Vista ultimate with SP1.