Today, I used Windows Vista (Home Basic) for the first time, and can’t really say I’m all that impressed. At first glance, it feels like XP with a different theme with most things moved around and renamed. Disclaimer: this Vista was running on a machine that wasn’t all that speccy, so I suspect the flashy shit was disabled.

“Holy crap! You want me to run on this? Man, you really should upgrade, but if you insist… That’s gonna have to go, and that… definitely not enough RAM for that… did your PC even have one of those Vista Capable stickers, you moron?”

Does Vista do this or am I making it all up? It probably does talk to itself, being a schitz and all. If it does automatically tone down the flashy based on hardware, that’s kinda nice. When we get our copy at work, I’ll try it on a decent PC. Anyway… First impressions:

• It looks like it’s trying hard to copy Mac OS X. Oversized icons, with a liberal amount of shiny applied. Man those icons are huge though. Like, comically huge.
• Vista doesn’t feel like Mac OS X. It’s hard to explain but OS X feels smooth and creamy, with the viscosity of melted creamed honey. On older hardware, refrigerated honey. The Vista GUI feels like KDE. When the graphics draw, they look kind of hard and flicky. If you’ve used KDE you might know what I mean. I only vaguely get this feeling from XP now, so maybe it was just the crappy Vista PC.
• Add/Remove Programs has been renamed to Programs or something so it took me ages to find it.
• I was constantly harrassed by popups asking my permission to run programs. Would have got at least 5 just Installing Symantec AV.
• Possibly not Vista related (Office 2007 was installed) but the new fonts totally rock my world and I can’t wait for them to be standard web fonts like Verdana and Trebuchet MS. Go on you hardcore Linux zealots, disagree and spruik the Bitstream Vera fonts (which rock btw), I can take it.
• Absolute worst offence: There’s a button on the Start Menu sporting what I perceive as the international symbol for power, you know the broken circle with a line through it. Clicking this would shut down the PC, right? RIGHT!? Standby. This is not what I expected.

On the last point, I found a site containing several papers on power symbol icons, some about user perception (DOC) which are quite fascinating.

Conclusions? Judgement is reserved for the moment, until I’ve given Vista a thorough workout on some decent hardware with all the shiny maxed out.