I decided to go ahead and install Vista on the new machine. Lenovo already had drivers available for all of the hardware, so that made things pretty simple. The installation of Vista itself was very straightforward, and then I went through a series of install driver –> reboot actions until all of the drivers were installed. In the grand scheme of things, Vista really doesn’t seem all that different from XP. In some ways the interface looks a little snazzier, and they moved everything around in the control panel, but in most respects it’s very similar.
The most annoying new thing (to me at least) is the User Account Control which basically asks you “are you sure?” any time you do anything beyond a basic activity like running a program. Installing anything new, doing something on the internet, or changing almost any settings in the control panel ends up prompting you to ask if that’s really something you want to do or not. That might be okay for somebody who doesn’t know what they are doing, but even then I have serious doubts about it. However, when you do know what you are doing the extra prompt showing up all the time is incredibly annoying (as in the “yes I want to do that which is precisely why I even clicked that button in the first place” kind of annoying).
I have to say, though, despite all of the differences and new annoyances, I’m still glad I went ahead and installed Vista. I will be using this new machine for a long time, and sometime over the next few years I know I would definitely want to move it to Vista, so it just made sense to go ahead and install it now to get that out of the way.
I was a bit worried about how fast Vista would run compared to XP, and while it does take a little longer to reboot, it seems reasonably quick and snappy once it is actually up and running. And the time required to sleep or hibernate seems to have been improved quite a bit, which is very nice on a notebook. So now that the operating system is up and running, I need to install all of the various programs that I use and then I should have everything all set.