I’ve completed my first ever Vista installation on a relative’s computer and I’m entirely underwhelmed. First of all, the only hardware it recognized out of the box was the soundcard (LOL). Just to clarify: I’m talking about a recent model of the Dell Inspiron laptop line here. Second of all, it failed to read the CD provided with the drivers (this is more of a Dell problem than a Vista problem).

Now over to Dell: even after specifying the exact model number, they can’t show a personalized menu. They can’t tell me if the laptop has a Broadcom or an Intel wireless chipset, so I have to download the drivers for both. They offer an option to download all the files at once (very good), but instead of using asynchronous javascript when adding the items (or even better, offer me a download everything that is listed here button), they make me reload the entire page, loose my position in the list and have to endure the painfully slow loading times (probably it was more a latency than throughput issue, because the download itself was pretty fast).

My conclusion is: none of the problems is dealbreaking, but it could be worked on. I will use Linux in the future and from where I stand, they could have called Vista XP SP3 and be done with it (of course they couldn’t make any money then, could they?). There just aren’t enough practical and visible improvements to make me change.