So much for my euphoria over Windows Vista's coolness and user friendliness. The first day went on very well without any problems. I installed most of the things I use. Firefox, Yahoo! Messenger, Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2, Thunderbird and everything was working fine. The one thing that was bugging me was that I was not able to use Aero Glass. I tried some tweaks that were published on some websites (http://www.neowin.net), but none of them worked. Instead it degraded my video experience. I know I can't really blame Microsoft for unsupported tweaks, but...

At that point, I reinstalled the operating system as nothing seemed to undo the changes that I had done, and the trouble started. The installation hung at one point and it wouldn't go anywhere. It just stopped on the nice new Vista Interface. The interface is indeed nice, but nobody would appreciate seeing it all the time given the fact that that picture is a just an interlude from when Windows starts to getting the login screen. A part of the image is shown below.

I restarted the installation and this time it went through correctly and again went through installing everything mentioned earlier and then decided that it was time to protect my computer. I use Webroot spysweeper on my other computer and I think it is a very good product to protect oneself from malware. I knew from my past experience with Windows Vista, that it didn't work with Beta 2. I thought that Microsoft would have made some changes to the OS to allow such programs to run. The program installs correctly, but when you restart the computer after installation, it tells you that Spysweeper has failed to execute and will shut down. An improvement from Beta 2 is that there is an option to run the program in a compatibility mode and tell Windows Vista what was the last operating system / settings / account privileges the program ran. I gave that information to Windows and from that point on it did not fail to execute, but Windows Defender (Microsoft's anti-spyware program) reported that the program is not yet classified and should be run at startup. Incidentally, it also reports Yahoo! Messenger similarly. Happily I closed that window, and tried to run a sweep to check if I had attracted any malware since installing the operating system. Apparently not. Windows did not let me run the sweep at all. It did not give me any error or anything, but it did not do anything as well. On clicking on sweep now, it just sits there doing nothing. Microsoft is bundling Windows Defender program free of charge with Windows Vista and I think it runs some of the programs from running. I remember reading something about the Windows no longer allowing programs to copy files to certain areas and writing to certain part of the registry. But as far as I understood, Webroot copies files into standard locations i.e. Program Files and writes in the HKLM and HKCU registry hives. If HKLM is not acceptable, then I think we will be running in to some major problems with most of the applications as HKLM is the base for a particular computer. I think the question then remains, if the programs cannot write to HKLM, then is Windows going to facilitate the registering of the program with HKLM?

Although Internet Explorer 7.0 RC1 is very good in terms of features, I am fan of Firefox and like to use that for my browsing needs. When I try to start Firefox, it does not come up for a very long time. I understand that Firefox does not load its supporting files in memory as Internet Explorer does when Windows starts up, but taking 2 minutes to startup is an awfully long time for any program. In fact I started IE7.0 almost 2 minutes after I clicked on Firefox and it came up immediately and then later Firefox started. This behaviour is not consistent though. Most of the times Firefox comes up with an acceptable delay. So I am not really sure what's going on there.

Frank Hayes of Computerworld has forewarned system administrators to start creating test labs of Windows Vista as Microsoft is giving out Windows Vista RC1 to whoever wants it and in some cases people who don't want it by including a DVD in some computer magazines. Hayes warns system administrators to not to allow VPN access from Windows Vista RC1 as there might be unknown security holes in the operating systems that we don't know about. I think that is one area where most of the system administrators can breathe easy. I have found out that some of the VPN software don't work with Windows Vista RC1. I tried Checkpoint VPN software and Cisco Systems VPN client. Both didn't work on Windows Vista Beta 2. I am yet to try it on Windows Vista RC1. Let's see how it goes.