More Vista and SolidWorks

Well it's been a couple months form my last Vista post and I have had to opportunity to use Vista on a daily basis, let me take a moment to tell you what you can expect.

First my PC: I have a Dell M90 Laptop with 2 gigs of ram and a Quadro FX 2500M video card. Vista rates your PC on a performance scale they call the Windows Experience Index and gives it a base score. The base score currently ranges from 1 to 5.9 and the higher the better, my PC has a score of 4.8 and I notice no hardware problems while running Vista. I will tell you this, not even to consider upgrading to Vista unless you have a newer machine no more than a year old with a quality graphics card and a least 2 gigs of ram. Otherwise your Vista experience will be less then exciting, for example my home laptop runs vista and has a base score of 2.4 it has sound problems and runs slow, but the PC was never intended to run Vista and is a couple years old.

For the most part I like Vista a lot and when I switch back to my XP machine I miss it. The general feel of Vista should be familiar to you; the layouts are very similar and for the most part functions the same. It will take you a week or two to get comfortable with the new interface and to find where they moved some setting and commands. There is one thing I turned off right away -- and I mean right away! User account control or UAC, Microsoft's way of protecting you from well yourself. You will want to disable this for your user account in the user account area.

You will find a lot of nice features in the new Vista. Too many to talk about in this blog; the best thing is to jump in and try it for yourself. If you are going to run SolidWorks, just wait for 2008 to come out (2007 has a Pre-Release 2 Vista version); I wouldn't bother with 2007 at this point. I have been using 2008 Beta 4 in Vista and it works great (you're going to love the new 2008). Soon we will be able to talk about 2008 and it will be out later this summer. Until then, if you're the cutting edge type get ready to switch to Vista, so far its great and more and more programs and drivers become available every day.