I have been using Windows Vista for over a week now. Why I chose to review Windows Vista I am unsure, but for reasons unknown I installed it. In the future I will review Windows Vista SP1 even though it’s likely the changes will be small.
The specifications of my laptop are as follows:
- AMD Turion 1.6 GHz tl-50 Dual Core,
- NVidia Geforce Go 6150
- Broadcom wireless
- 1GB of RAM
- 80 GB Hard Drive
I’ll be covering these topics:
- The Hardware
- How does it run?
- What I like and dislike
I was not surprised to discover that Vista is a resource hog. It takes about 2 minutes to boot the OS, log in, then load wireless, sidebar, and a whole lot more stuff. The Windows side bar takes the longest to load its five widgets. I use a clock widget, weather reporter, CPU usage monitor, calendar, and currency converter. The CPU usage stays over 10% all the time, even when I’m not doing anything. That makes me sad.
Vista: a turtle could probably crawl up and down the stairs a couple of times before it loads. There is nothing that is clearly slowing it down, except maybe all the sidebar widgets. The overall visual theme is a lot better in my opinion than XP’s and previous versions. Applications seem to load quickly, though they should be with all the RAM and CPU power this computer has.
Here are my likes and dislikes about Vista:
First the good:
- The default wallpapers are very nice
- The visual theme is pleasant to the eyes.
- It runs smoothly, without any stability problems.
- No BSODs!
And now the bad:
- Takes almost 2 minutes to load.
- The lack of visual customization makes the interface get boring after a while.
- Microsoft need to find a way to get it to run faster.
- The Microsoft help line always asks you to restart your computer.
- The wireless can get screwed up after waking from hibernation.
Overall, Vista is better then XP but does not beat Linux. I may be biased individual, but I think that Linux loads and runs faster as well as being more customizable. I do like Vista and I may come back to it, but I can’t help liking Linux a lot better after all the problems that I have been through with Vista and other Windows versions.
The ratings:
3/5 for usability
4/5 for GUI
1/5 for customizability
3/5 for performance
Overall rating:
11/20. An okay OS, but it can’t beat the competition.
If you would like to give feedback, please use the “leave reply box” to leave me a comment.
2 responses to “Ryan Orser’s Windows Vista Review”
Disappointing;
The new Vostro from Dell came with pre-installed Vista. My usual approach is to load all of the software I use and then configure, a 15 to 20 hour process. I tried using the files and settings transfer and this just did not import or move most of my files. The programs that did transfer did not include my personalized settings. At this point I dropped back to the old install system, item by item. After setting up the new system, including getting rid of those d***ed nags that were popping up constantly I decided to use the disk cleanup function. 20 hours down the drain. The program deleted over 66,000 files. All this with me looking at the screen with mouth agape; first round to vista. Obviously restore from the recycle bin did not work for this. I found an undelete program and set it to work. Unfortunately a few bits in most programs had been overwritten while groping around so I started reloading programs, second round to Vista. As I dragged files from my cloned hard drive the program kept flagging, insufficient memory, even though the files were only around a 300mb size. Now darn it, I paid for 2 GB just so this type of thing did not happen!!!! Now I begin to see a pattern, my programs, most, not all, need to have a Vista version to work. The new Vista versions of the programs, Zone Alarm for example, has missing details such as update progress windows. I guess these were rushed out to enable people to have something. Most drivers appear to be the same, a rush job. Some hardware doesn’t have any drivers written for Vista as of today. There are quirks showing up. As I use the keyboard to step through the explorer tree in the left pane, the right hand pane does not update the contents of the folders unless I click on the folder with the mouse. I spoke to Dell tech support and requested a copy of XP to replace Vista and they informed me the Vostro 1700 is not compatible with XP. My new Gateway with XP may cross paths with the returning Dell. Goodbye, good luck Vista. I may revisit in another year but now, no. My fault, I usually allow an operating system to mature at least a full year, maybe two.
Interesting article. Personally I love Vista, have been running it for about a ywar now and never looked back, but I know so many people who moan about it and really don’t like it. MY boss evenu uninstalled it and re-installed XP lol, the mentalist. So what it needs more ram blah blah, the world evolves, things have to change andno matter what anyone says, at the very least, Vista is a step in the right direction.