Vista test driven
Jun 20th, 2007 by morpheus
I got my hands on a copy of the beta 2 of Vista (touted as the next big thing for the average joe computer user) last week and decided to give it a try.
Although I try not to cave in to the enticement of being able to try software before most other users, I went ahead and installed Vista Beta because Microsoft was giving away authentic product keys on this occasion.
You what that means?
So I burned the mammoth 3GB Vista DVD image onto a rewritable disk (you didn’t think I’d commit a regular DVD for that stuff, did you?)
And onto the installation process.
First annoyance came when Vista refused to install on a FAT32 partition.
The exact reason behind that will become later on, but for now let’s just say they have a “good enough” reason for insisting on NTFS.
There were no customization options offered during the installation, and after about half and hour Vista was sitting pretty occupying a good 8.5GB of harddisk prime estate.
Of which, around 1.5GB was the pagefile and another 1.5GB is hiberfil.sys (dedicated for the hibernation feature).
Next, Vista wouldn’t recognise my LAN card.
And since the card manufacturer’s site no longer exists, I had to rip out the driver files from my XP installation.
I must give it to the Vista developers … for all the code re-write they have put into Vista, all my XP specific drivers still work like a charm on Vista.
And then there is the “user access control” feature.
Windows has always been criticised for letting users easily mess up their system, unlike certain other “secure” operating systems where any major system operation requires reentering the root password.
So they put the same into Vista … any system wide change now has to go through a number of warnings and prompts.
Naturally, the next thing I did was to turn off user access control.
But admittedly, this is good thinking on the part of Vista developers.
The average joe will be wary enough of messing up his system, while the ones who really know what they are doing will simply disable this feature.
Next I took a peek into the task manager. 700MB RAM usage right off the boot !
Now don’t get me wrong, I have a pretty decent system that I threw Vista upon and 700MB is not really a big deal, but this somehow wouldn’t let me sleep peacefully in the night.
So I took up trimming Vista next.
Search indexing service was using around 100MB. I suspect this service might use lesser or more varying from case to case.
Another good concept, and let me tell you, it does make for some lightning fast searches. But I know exactly what I put on my PC and know exactly where I put it, thank you very much.
TrustedInstaller service was using another 90MB or so.
Which brings us to the reason behind the choice of NTFS.
Even the administrator doesn’t have the ownership of the system files, but this service called TrustedInstaller has full permissions on them.
Thus, any change made to system files has to be through this service. Again, this way the Vista developers intend to prevent users from messing up their own systems.
And yet again, a power user who knows his way around things can easily take ownership and full control of everything, while average joe is unable to directly mess with the system files
After disabling thw above two and many other useless services like TabletPC related, Diagnostics related, Media center related, backup/restore related and update related services … Vista boots up using under 250MB memory.
(note : The task manager itself is using around 8 MB out of the usage shown here)
And that with Aero Glass – the desktop windows manager service (DWM) enabled and running!
Stopping the DWM and Themes service bring the memory usage down to around 150MB!
But the Aero Glass looks so good that I’m willing to dedicate a 100MB of memory to have it running.
Just look at these neat looking Windows screenshots :