Allen,

I have to agree with your assessment of Vista. I have a Technet copy of ultimate running under GSX and many of the annoyances you found I concur with. There are some tools like the enhancements to taskmanager that are great, but by and large they do not compensate for UAC idiocy and the fancy doodads that add nothing to efficiency when it comes to getting work done. I have the OS configured with "classic" theme and bone stock everything and its a CPU pig. Certainly there is some lost in the fact I'm running on GSX VMware, but the host system is a dual core 3 GHz with 3 GB RAM XP-SP2 to start and carved out of that for just the virtual Vista OS is a single 3 GHz CPU and 1GB RAM. Vista ultimate takes about 7 GB of disk space and idles at 400MB of RAM doing nothing and clocks the CPU to 95% opening pretty tame stuff the control panel. i do not like the navigational changes in the control panel and other advanced system properties either, too much mousing.

I wanted to mention about DOT banning Vista though. Some US federal agencies are horribly slow on the uptake of even long released SPs for their standard PCs. I work at a federal agency (to remain nameless) and manage scientific computing for about 300 Windows workstations amongst other things. The mainstream office PCs are handled by a different internal organization and only last fall they finally included SP2 for XP in their image, waiting all the way up to the 11th hour of support for SP1. They also have still banned MSIE7 and do not allow Firefox or any other alternate browser. My scientific systems had SP2 long ago and Firefox is available for those who want (or need) it for external browsing along with MSIE7 as an optional install most people have accepted to install on their scientific workstations and lab instruments by now.

Ordinarliy I'd be starting to roll test systems of Vista beyond my staff into the general scientific user population by now, but with my experience with Vista so far, I see no advantage to upgrade and only increased support labor. It will remain in test phase when I have the time to poke and prod it for a while. MS had an opportunity to make a big improvement with this OS and they blew it so far as I can see. If I had wanted a Mac, I would have bought one - no thanks.

mole
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mole

Who is John Galt?