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I bought a new Compaq Presario notebook. It came with Microsoft Vista Home Basic. Lifting up the cover, I found a one-page note saying the notebook will go through serious optimization for twenty some minutes and don’t panic if it goes dark screen or reboot.  Sure enough,  it did all that without prompting me for any input. This makes you wonder why they don’t finish this step at factory?! Circuit City actually have their Firedog technitians work on some of them and sell it for $50 more, since now the box is opened and marked with a sharpie saying ‘Optimized’.

Even after optimization, I am yet to be impressed with the performance with 512M RAM  plus an Intel Celeron M 440 (1.86GHZ) CPU.  So far, the only things new I noted of the Vista Home Basic are the following:

• The recycle bin on the desktop is translucent, so you can see the trash inside. Yeah!
• IE 7.0.6 is featured with Live Search, tabbed browsing. All learned from Mozilla or Firefox, I assume. Competition is great, isn’t it?
• I couldn’t find the ‘Run’ from the infamous Start menu.  So, in order to find the MAC address of the embeded Realtek network card to feed to the IP reservation settings on my broadband router, I ended up CTRL+ALT+DELETE to get to the Windows Task Manager. From the Task Manager, I started a new task named ‘cmd’. There, I got a good old DOS window to run “ipconfig /detail”.
• Prettier icons and more vibrant color everywhere.  cuter desktop themes too.
• The Chinese INPUT is much more usable. The ugly one is still available as a selectable item named ‘classic’.  Guess ‘classic’ is a neutral adjective after all! I chose my location as China (PRC) from the get-go. Not sure how much hassle it would be to add the language support and text input support. It was a bit of loopy in Windows XP and prior versions.
• The locale selection is more or less a teaser, since
  • It is not truly localized though, since everything else is still in English
  • The hints are here and there to remind me that I did indeed specify the correct locale
    • the Chinese text input in the sys tray
    • IE 7  defaults its start page to the baidu.com, the Chinese equivalent of Google.
    • a desktop shortcut to eBay’s Chinese portal (Yi Qu)

All in all, I am not impressed. To be fair, I am not much of a GUI guy, coming from a UNIX/Linux background.  I guess I need to read the release notes to see what’s changed in the guts.

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