A few things about Vista

First of all, don't think I'm flaming Vista or trying to degrade it in any way. I actually run Vista Ultimate on my own machine at home. I would just like to point out a few, quirks as you might say, of the OS.

1) Driver support is lackluster at best. The change from XP to Vista is much greater than that of 2000 to XP, so expect an even rougher transition compatibility wise. The only good side to this is that Vista does have a compatibility mode for tricking games to run as if the OS was 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc...

2) Vista claims a lot of security benefits. For the most part, this is true. However, there are a lot of breaches to this security. One of the most famous is the "speech command" exploit. In order for this exploit to work, you have to have speech recognition enabled(come on... how many of us use that?). Now, if for some reason you're in the 0.01% of the world that uses that, and you have your speakers on, AND you're away from the computer, some remote system(such as a website or someone that's already inside your system) could play sounds through your speaker and gain a small amount of control for your system. However, they still would be unable to perform UAC commands... they could only do simple commands such as shut down your computer, delete non-OS essential files, etc... Most of the criticisms about Vista's security is from otherOS-fanbois who would rather spend 10 hours doing something in -insert OS here- than 1 hour doing it in Windows, just to say their OS could do the task. However there are some legitimate security issues, so just examine the sources and see how significant the issues are.

3) "Games run slower in Vista than XP". Well, I'll just point you to this site: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=354&type=expert . One interesting fact that most people know by now is that DirectX10 will only be released for the Vista platform. So if you want to play the latest games with ease, you'll need to eventually upgrade to Vista. However, Vista has no OpenGL support, and expect OpenGL games to only run at around 1/4 the speed of XP. I'm hiding my remarks on this marketing strategy by Microsoft.

4) Aeroglass. It is nifty and pretty. That's pretty much all I have to say about it, because that's all there really is to it. It's a shiny and is impressive to Windows-tab through during presentations.

5) Imaging. If you do ANY kind of system imaging, whether it be from removeable media, or a push from a server, you do not want to go with Vista. With all of the ACPI tables, BIOS strings, and SLIP, imaging is nigh impossible. It's a good thing Vista has sysprep.exe installed by default. In order to bypass Windows hardware change safety feature, you must do the following to save an image that will function correctly with pushed or copied to another machine:

• a) Copy all drivers to the computer and create a batch file that will install drivers automatically and/or silently
  
• b) Install all programs and setup the machine for imaging.
  
• c) Run sysprep.exe from the machine you are getting the image from. You must select Generalize! Generalizing the image removes all drivers, and thus bypassing any hardware detection.
  
• d) Create your ISO file after the system reboots, using Ghost or Windows PE or whatever your flavor is.
  
• e) After you copy the image to the new machine, it should boot up into the OOBE, or "Welcome to Windows Vista" screen. Press Ctrl-Shift-F3, and this will send you to Audit mode again.
  
• f) Inside audit mode, run your batch file to install all drivers, then reboot.
  
• g) Reboot the machine, and all drivers, programs, and other settings should match the original perfectly.

Ok, that is enough about Vista for now.