I downloaded a copy of Vista Ultimate a while ago (let’s just say torrented) and recently installed it. I didn't really know what to expect from it, I’ve used it before for short periods of time and was annoyed with how things are rearranged from XP. I was a bit wary after hearing all the things people say about it online and I have a friend with a Sempron and although I can't say for sure whether it was due to Vista or another problem such as the laptop itself it was slow, real slow.
I'll start by saying that the computer I will be installing Vista on is a Acer laptop that has had numerous conflicts and problems using a combination of XP with a plethora of Acer utilities that serve little purpose other than to add bloat and cause errors some of which may not be immediately associated with the Acer utilities.
The installation process was simple and required answering a few questions and partitioning the drive before installing. The installation took about 30-60 minutes to fully setup and takes me to the desktop.
One of the first things I noticed in exploring Vista is that all the applications Acer bundles with all their laptops have even less place in Vista than they did in XP. Vista comes with pretty much all the functionality of the Acer utilities.
Vista seems faster than XP, this is probably due to not having all the Acer applications slowing it down, but either way it's good.
Vista included working drivers for everything in my laptop apart from a card reader and a webcam, both drivers were found reasonably easily on the Acer website.
By default all Acer laptops come with three separate partitions, one is a PQSERVICE partition that cannot be modified. This contains the Acer equivalent of HP's useless (temporary) tattoo that allows you to install the OS that comes with the PC. It also comes with two partitions: C:\ and D:\ halving disk space. In my case both partitions were FAT32. Not seeing the purpose of this arrangement I decided to use the Disk Managers Shrink and Extend functionality to shrink D:\ to 2GB and increase the C:\. Wanting to keep the drive as a Basic disk I found I had to create an extra partition with the space freed from D:\ and play Tower of Hanoi to make the free space sequential to C:\ so that I could expand the C:\.
Overall Vista is pretty good, and while some people have problems with it; I personally haven't had any trouble and after getting used to the new locations of things I’ve become pretty happy with it and I won’t be going back to XP unless I have to.
