Is there any more to say about Vista? Probably not; yet after reading 30 days with Vista I can’t resist a few comments.
The author, Brian Boyko, says:
On two separate computers I had major stability problems which resulted in loss of data. This is an unforgivable sin …. Additionally, Vista claims backwards compatibility, but I’ve had major and minor problems alike with many of my games, more than a few third-party applications, my peripherals, and, in short, I encountered problems that actively prevented me from getting my work done. Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data.
As for me, I installed Vista RTM on four computers shortly after it was released to manufacturing in November last year. Two plain desktops, one media center, one laptop. Just for the record, my experience is dull by comparison with Boyko’s. No lost data; all my important apps run fine; I am not plagued by UAC prompts; the OS is stable.
Have there been hassles? Yes. Tortoise SVN crashes Explorer from time to time; a perfectly good Umax scanner has no driver; Vista on the laptop had severe resume problems which only recently seem to have been fixed by a BIOS update. And Creative’s X-Fi drivers for Vista are terrible. There are also annoyances, like Vista’s habit of thinking your documents are music.
At the same time, I’ve seen nothing to change my opinion that the majority of Vista’s problems are driver-related. Overall I like it better than XP; it doesn’t get in the way of my work and I would hate to go back.
When I do use XP, some of the things I miss are the search box in the Start menu (the Vista Start menu is miles better in other ways as well); the thumbnail previews in the task bar and in alt-tab switching; and copy and paste which doesn’t give up at the first hurdle. I also miss Vista’s more Unix-like Home directories, sensibly organized under Users rather than buried in Documents and Settings.
Security-wise, I consider both User Account Control and IE’s protected mode to be important improvements.
Forget the “Wow”. This is just the latest version of Windows; and it’s not as good as it should be, five years on from XP.
Nevertheless, it is a real improvement, and I’ve been happy with it over the last four months.
Vista uses 100% CPU with no apps open on my laptop, so I uninstalled it. It’s fine on the desktop though. *shrug*
A temp at work has Vista on her new home computer and moans that a lot of the “stuff” she used to run no longer works. I’ve heard similar comments from other non-geeks too who haven’t bought it because they are concerned that it won’t work with what they currently have. I’m surprised that non-geeks have even noticed, and even more surprised that they are worried about apps breaking when most of them aren’t really sure what the OS actually does.
Regards,
Rob…
Laptops tend to have a large number of devices; my recent laptop has more than my desktop, with wi-fi, Bluetooth, fingerprint reader, clever pointing device, etc etc.
Unless you enjoy troubleshooting problems and trawling the web for drivers, or have an upgrade pack from the laptop vendor, it’s probably unwise to attempt an upgrade.
That’s my advice after doing just that 🙂
Tim
it’s not as good as it should be
Er, in what ways is it not as good as it should be? Most of what you described seem to be third-party driver problems. I’m not challenging you, just asking what things aren’t right that you think ought to be.
Charles
Yes, interesting question. Remember the history: the Windows team started down one path, found it wasn’t working, and then there was the famous reset when when the codebase was reverted to Windows 2003 and the team restarted.
That must have cost 18-24 months of development time at least.
This is why Vista was both rushed and long-delayed.
The outcome is that some important features were dropped, WinFS being the most prominent example, and others show signs of haste.
I recommend a browse around the Shell Revealed forums; some of the posts identify minor inconsistencies and omissions which are the symptoms of a rushed release.
Another thing: performance could be better, especially for desktop search.
Vista is OK, but delays and mismanagement mean that it is not as good as it should be.
Tim