It's been a Very Merry Vista Christmas here at the Vermont Burke Homestead. Let me quickly set the stage for you. The siblings decided that our 77-year-old Momma Bear needed her first PC. The DSL has been installed today if Verizon did their part, so pictures of grandkids should start flowing across the BurkeNet ether any day now.
To put a decent PC in Momma Bear's hands, the Vermont Burkes decided it was a good time for a family upgrade. We would send off my wife's 2-year-old HP running XP Home to Momma, my wife would get my 9-year-old daughter's 1-year-old HP running XP Professional, and my daughter would get a new HP running Vista Home Premium. I like HPs as you can tell.
So the week before Christmas I boxed up my wife's 2-year-old PC in its original packing along with a new Samsung 19" LCD monitor, UPS, wireless NIC and router I ordered for direct delivery from Amazon to a youthful and techno-savvy Burke couple near Momma Bear's house. I was told that everything in Santa's sleigh for Momma arrived on schedule and Christmas at Momma Bear's house was a big success.
While Santa was on route to Momma Bear's house I picked up the Vista machine and completed the family upgrade as planned. Playing with Vista Home Professional on my daughter's new PC has been my first real exposure to the OS that's been getting such a bad wrap. I wanted to like Vista but had to confess to having reservations. I attended too many .NET presentations over the last year where the presenters felt they were required to bad-mouth Vista for one reason or another. And I believed them.
For the last week I would have to say that Vista has impressed the heck out of me. The interface is soooo much nicer than XP, and from an administrative perspective, Vista is so much more functional than XP for doing things like managing startup programs or drilling down into the task manager. One thing I heard was that the UI wasn't as intuitive as previous OSs, but that was anything but the truth from my experience. Okay, I did have one moment of UI confusion. I didn't understand how to logout! Then my 9-year-old daughter said, "Dad, there's a triangle right there in the Start Menu." D'oh!
So far I am completely sold on Vista, and I'm only a year behind the OS curve ball. That's not too shabby for me!
