Like myself, Ed Bott over at his ZDNet Blog is also documenting his transition to Windows Vista. Unfortunately for Ed, he hit a bit of a snag when trying to update the BIOS of his Dell computer. As he relates in his Day 2 post, I agree that it is probably unrelated to Vista. In any event, I will monitor his progression via his blog as I am curious to see his experience.

I should probably give a little computer info to keep things in perspective. My computer is over three years old, and has a P4 3GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB, and 120GB hard drive. Windows XP Pro ran on if from day 1, and ran well.

So far, I am quite happy with Vista. It has been rock solid, and the performance is in general better than I was expecting. I was wondering how the 1GB RAM would hold me back. So far, I really only experience serious disc swapping first thing in the morning. I am guessing that the full system virus scan that happens over night is causing all the swapping. After this initial swapping, everything runs quite smoothly. I switch between Adobe Photoshop, Outlook 2007, Word 2007, and a variety of web utilities(FTP, SSH, etc.) and everything is snappier than I imagined.

One thing that really got my attention, was the new firewall in Vista. Finally Microsoft is shipping an operating system with a decent firewall. It is highly configurable, the only relative weakness in my limited experience with it so far is the logging. Even still, it is leaps and bounds ahead of their other firewall offerings.