Pros: attractive interface, greater emphasis on security
Cons: resource hog, poor backwards compatibility
The Bottom Line: Vista just requires too much horsepower. Most of what it does can be done by XP just as well or better with significantly less demands on system resources.
kurt_g's Full Review: Microsoft Windows® Vistaâ„¢ Home Premium Edit...
I'm a LAN technician. I work with computers. I network 'em, I get LANs and VPN's up and running. Most of my clients, like the rest of the world, use Microsoft operating systems.
In early 2007, my kids decided to conduct an experiment to see if it was possible to shake a computer's memory chips loose without opening the case. They did this by jumping on it. So, I figured that I was going to have to support this operating system; might as well get a look at it before it got rolled out.
I bought a Dell E521 with Vista Home Premium. With 1 GB of RAM, Vista crawled, so I upgraded to 2 GB and got much better results.
That, in my book, was a bad sign for Vista. XP, for example, will provide a painful experience at 256 MB of RAM; 512 is enough to make most users happy. While I do understand that there are five or six years between the OS's, quadrupling the amount of RAM for an acceptable experience is a large jump.
Vista attempts to provide security through User Account Control. Anytime you install software, it will ask you if you're really, really sure that you want to install it. This is a good idea in theory, but the implementation is very poor. Why? Because the user is going to get tired of the constant pop-ups and is going to just start clicking OK to make it go away. It wasn't too long until I figured out how to turn off User Account Control. It's good to see MS thinking of security, but the way they went about it was horribly done.
I was also not able to install a few older games that I had that had run fine under XP. That I can tolerate -- after all, these games were designed to run under Windows 98 and 2000.
Windows Vista includes a sidebar, where you can dock Gadgets -- clocks, some programs, a calendar, an RSS feed, what have you. I added a CPU meter. With it I see the depressing amounts of processor time that programs require under this bloated OS. I'm the first to admit I like to have several windows open, but Vista pegs the CPU at 100% for relatively simple tasks (opening Firefox, Word, etc) and stays there for several minutes.
Even Explorer.exe -- the Windows shell -- is nowhere near stable in Vista; it crashes significantly more frequently than its XP version. I know how to fix this (kill the explorer.exe task, then create a new one.)
XP had the old Network Connections applet, which was very good at what it did -- told you the status of your network connection. I have both a wireless and wired connection (I'm a tech, what do you want?) Can someone tell me where to go to get my old network connections applet back? The monstrosity that replaced it is quite insistent that my regular wired Ethernet connection is in fact using my wireless network.
What's good about Vista? Well, it's more secure than XP is out of the box. Boot-up time is about par with XP with adequate hardware. The Aero interface is indeed very attractive and easy to use. IPV6 is built right in. That's one that isn't so important now, but will be important if and when IPV6 becomes standard.
Also, Vista supports Volume Shadow Copy. This is a technology in their Server 2003 server operating system. It allows you to restore older versions of files with point and click ease.
But....Vista Home Premium doesn't support it. Well, not exactly. It makes the copies just as the other versions do. It just won't let you GET at that data if you need it. So you get the overhead of CPU time and disk space, but not the benefits. How much sense does this make? Fortunately, there is a free download called Shadow Explorer that will enable it. But for the life of me I can't see why Microsoft would set things up like this.
Ultimately, with Vista, it seems that we've gotten a pretty interface. The price for that for it was the best parts of XP. So far, I'm just not impressed.
Vista may yet improve. Service Pack 2 did a great deal to make XP a much better operating system. But for right now, we get unstable versions of parts of the operating system that have worked just fine since Windows 2000, hefty RAM requirements, and disabled software when it makes no sense.
Vista just doesn't offer me anything that I can't get in XP. Eventually it'll be adopted by default. Eventually the most glaring flaws will be fixed (or else Vista will be given the unceremonious retirement that Windows ME got.) But for now -- I'm keeping my XP CD's.
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