The Buena Vista Operating System Club

This week my new Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop arrived, and I've been busily setting it up all week. The laptop is beautiful and works great, but that's not what I wanted to discuss here. Rather, this is my first Windows Vista machine, and I wanted to describe my experience so far.

I was scared of going Vista, having heard plenty of negative stuff. The bad reviews all seemed to center around three complaints:

• "It's hard to get used to Vista because so many things are different from Windows XP."
• "Vista's User Account Control (UAC) is constantly nagging me to allow this or that."
• "None of my peripherals work and there aren't even drivers for them."

Now, I'm no big fan of Windows or anything, but I have to be honest here: I have none of those complaints. Addressing them one by one:

• Yes, things are in different places, but it has never taken me more than a few seconds to figure out where to find something.
  
• Yes, User Account Control does ask my permission to do certain things, but it's definitely not as frequent as the Apple TV commercials make it sound! I'm aware of the importance of the security features, and it just isn't that big a deal.
• Here's how difficult it was to hook my (6-year-old) printer up to my Vista machine: I leaned over and unplugged it from my old machine, plugged it into the Vista machine, Vista found and installed the drivers, and I was able to print. No problem with either of my external hard drives, either.

My most important programs (Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks) installed without a single problem.

It doesn't hurt that Vista is visually so much prettier than earlier Windows OSs either.

I'm just 3 days into this, but overall, everything works, most things are easier, and I'm enjoying it.