And my first thoughts on Vista are mixed, to say the least.
This is the first desktop computer I’ve ever bought with the Operating system installed. It’s a quick setup, but I actually like doing a OS install, so I missed that.
One thing I like to do is prepare the hard drive first. For years now, I’ve split a hard drive into smaller partitions, and put the OS on the first partition. This had the benefit of making for smaller drives (good if you need to defrag, or repair the files after a crash), and I’ve grown accustomed to pulling out Partition Magic with a new computer purchase.
Not this time: apparently Vista uses a slightly tweaked NTFS format, one that older versions of Partition Magic can’t handle. This also applies to Ghost (a disk drive backup tool), another favorite I had planned to use.
And although Vista now comes with a drive ‘shrinker’ like Partition Magic, Vista places files all over the drive, and some can’t be moved to make room – which means I can’t shrink it as much as I expected: my 500 gig partition could only reduced to about 220 gig, even after I turned off shadowing, swap file, and any system program I could think of that wrote to the disk.
Vista also comes with a disk backup tool as well – but the advantage of Ghost and Partition Magic was that you could run them from the boot up, handy for managing problems without going into Windows first.
The only solution I found (aside from buying the latest of these tools)? Wipe the hard drive, set up as ‘old style’ NTFS, and then put everything back.
However, Vista doesn’t come on a disk anymore, but a recovery partition – and THAT apparently only wipes the drive back to factory original state!
It’s an odd thing, but quite in keeping with Microsoft’s ethos (these tweaks to the NTFS apparently make it more difficult to install Linux). But I think given Microsoft’s battle to maintain market share, they should be making things more open, not less.
Bu then, I’m not worth 40 billion dollars – and I’m not going to get that way talking about openness.
Stay tuned for more Vista observations.
