Last Friday Microsoft made Windows Vista available for MSDN subscribers. At about 6:30 AM, Friday I rushed into MSDN downloads page and started the download. Thanks to my damn ADSL connection download finished on Sunday at about 8:30 AM (Unfortunately this is the only ADSL plan available in Sri Lanka :S).

This is the first time I'm using Vista in my box (well… I tried the beta bits given away during PDC 2003, but it was really not the correct beta to comment on ;)). Cool thing about the installation media is, it contains every version of Vista. So firstly I installed it in my brand new work station (3.4 Dual core, 2GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GPU (256 MB PCI Express).

The installation was really fast (for me it took only ~20 minutes) and most of the beta drivers (especially for my GPU) are bundled with the OS. However, the latest GeForce driver has a bug and it does not let you set the native resolution of your screen if you are using a HD, WideScreen, flat panel screen like me. Then I removed my DVI cable and connected the screen with a standard VGA cable (analog connection) then everything started to work! After digging the web little further I found that the digital connection should work with the previous version of GeForce Forceware drivers (96.33). So if you have this trouble, try to uninstall your current display drivers from the device manager and run the 96.33 installation.

Finally I loaded my box with Vista and I went like "WOW!!!" :). It's simply a gorgeous beauty in the town (May be I should say in the Microsoft town as I have not seen other operating systems quite recently ;)). The Aero theme looks mighty cool on my HD display and I love the 3D window switching feature (Thanks to GeForce GPU. It rocks!).

Also the media center gives life to all my media. Apart from that I noticed that the performance is improved considerably (Loading the OS, opening/closing programs etc happens faster than Windows XP I was running on same hardware).

I'm sure working on this box would please my eyes! I will let you know whether it would please my brain very soon :).