Running Vista at home

I recently moved over to the Transactions team-- proud owners of System.Transactions, MSDTC, and OleTx. As I ramp up over there, I thought I would get in the habit of posting by keeping a small journal of what it's like to convert over to Vista at home.

First, what does the machine look like? It's an HP Pavilion zd8000. I bought this machine for two reasons: it is a portable desktop and it works well as a Media Center PC. I figured that when the laptop inevitably falls too far behind the technology curve, it'll still work as a PVR. As a portable desktop, it has a 100 GB hard drive, 17" widescreen monitor, !GB main memory, 256 MB video RAM, full size keyboard, and built in everything (wireless, network, modem, bluetooth, firewire, loads of USB ports, and a multi-function media card reader). FWIW, I also discovered that the particular machine I own shipped with a 64-bit CPU. Unfortunately, most of the drivers only exist as 32-bit, so I stuck with a 32-bit install of Windows.

Yesterday, I brought in the laptop and loaded Vista + Office 2007 onto the machine. Why both? That's the way the image is setup on the network. We're currently dogfooding Windows Deployment Services, the successor to RIS. My first impression of WDS-- NICE! I did a clean install on my machine and was logging into my account within 20 minutes. Previously, a similar install would take about one hour.

I spent about 30 minutes loading drivers for devices Device Manager identified as missing. Between Windows Update and the manufacturer's web site, everything was up and running.

This PC spends a lot of time as a PVR and bedroom TV. Last night, I saw the following improvements in Media Center:

• The volume is greatly improved. The control has a set of levels scaled from 1 to 25. On Media Center 2005, I needed to have the volume control somewhere around 19 in order to hear the show from about 10 feet away. Last night, the control spent a good amount of time around 3 or 4. The laptop has built in Altec Lansing speakers. Media Center on Vista is finally driving the speakers much better.
• When viewing the Guide, changing settings, or doing other navigation while watching a show, Media Center 2005 would drop the current show to a miniscule box that was only viewable if I was on top of the computer. On Vista, the current program still takes up the full screen and the menu navigation just overlays the whole thing so you can read the guide and see your program.
• Channel switching feels faster. I can't quanitify this, but the responsiveness seems to match that of my other TVs instead of being slower.

Vista also has a new technology called 'SuperFetch'. The idea is that over time, Vista will learn your habits and load commonly used applications faster. This PC sees most of its time in Visual Studio, Outlook and Media Center (I haven't loaded any games... yet). My first few loads of these applications did seem SSSLLLLLOOOOOWWWW. Slow enough that I was thinking "If things don't improve, I'm ending the experiment." This morning, I booted up and flicked on Media Center to watch the local news. Instead of seeing a long delay, I was just in and watching TV. This was faster than what I had experienced yesterday on Media Center 2005. It seems that I got a sub-second response to having the application open. I think I just experienced SuperFetch.

I see some things that I have yet to figure out too. I'll go into those in my next post.