Yup – the dark side has got me – I’ve installed Windows Vista.
But don’t worry: it’s only replaced my somewhat older XP installation temporarily as part of an assignment for University. And luckily I didn’t need to purchase a license either – Microsoft allows students in my course to apply for free Academic licenses.
So that’s why I found myself installing Vista Business Edition this past weekend.
The installation was actually fairly smooth compared to Windows XP – but it still didn’t look and feel quite as “nice” as an OS X installation. Nice touch: My Apple wireless keyboard was correctly detected during installation without any effort on my part.
The boot camp drivers mostly worked as expected, except for my Apple Wireless Keyboard (which Windows was already using just fine!). As soon as Apple’s drivers were installed and I had re-paired the keyboard, it just wouldn’t work. Luckily a quick Google later soon fixed the issue.
Once Vista was on my wireless network, it proceeded to start downloading several hundred megabytes of updates. This works almost just as well as under OS X, however the interface and naming scheme for Windows’ updates just seems a lot more daunting.
The aero interface is fairly snappy, but the opaque windows just look “muddy” in my opinion. As soon as you have a few open and they start overlapping, you end up with a visual mess of a border around each window.
But all in all I think that on a Mac at least, Vista seems to work just as well as its predecessor.