My Windows Vista Review / Opinion

I received a new laptop that came pre-installed with Vista at Xmas. My initial thought was to wipe it clean and install XP on it. This was a reaction to all the bad press Vista has received. However I decided to give it a chance for a while and make up my own mind.

Some points:

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Memory: First off you will need a LOT of memory (RAM) to run Vista. 2GB is recommended. Doing nothing other than running Vista uses up 500-600MB of RAM. Running it on a machine with 1GB of RAM would not be a pleasant experience.

Looks: The operating system itself looks great, windows are transparent like frosted glass and they fade in and shrink themselves in quite an attractive way. These effects can be turned off for computers with lower graphic specifications, they are just eye candy after all. You can turn on an XP theme if you wish.

User Access Control (UAC): One major annoyance with Vista is the addition of a new safety feature called User Access Control (UAC). The UAC feature requires you to confirm via a popup dialog whenever you perform an activity that is more 'core' than your average activity e.g. installing a program, turning on and off certain operating system features. I understand that principle behind the feature i.e. preventing unauthorised programs from performing nefarious activities, but the problem is you will encounter many, many of these popup dialogs in your daily usage of Vista. It gets irritating having to confirm everything over and over again. After a while I had enough and disabled the feature. I do believe I had to enable the Vista administrator account to disable it though.

Features: Vista comes installed with an in-built firewall (Windows Firewall) and anti-spyware program (Windows Defender) which are two features that were needed so thumbs up. There is no built-in anti-virus program however which is a bit strange. Searching for files and folders has been vastly improved.

Stability: I read a lot about driver issues and programs that didn't work with Vista. I have only encountered one program that wouldn't install correctly. Maybe I'm just lucky but I was able to get my old set of XP favourite programs installed and running correctly. Vista has also yet to crash, it seems just as stable as XP is.

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I have decided to keep Vista installed on my machine. Apart from a few annoyances that I was eventually able to get around I am happy with the speed, features and reliability of the new operating systems. I think your satisfaction with Vista may lie in how you normally use an operating system but my usage requirements it has served me well. Also remember that quite soon Vista will see its first Service Pack release and this should fix a lot of bugs and make it more efficient.

Frank I am glad that you have given it a shot and that Vista is working well for you.

My experience was a little more frustrating. My partners computer crashed so we bought a new one with Windows Vista. He is currently enrolled in school online for his bachelors degree so he needed one quickly. We found a great deal at a major computer retailer, and thought that was it.
Nothing he had as far as programs worked on the basic Vista. The initial $800 investment of the new computer, and then an additional $1300 in upgrades was really frustrating. This was from RAM, memory, Vista Premium upgrade (this is needed to use all the online networking etc. for the online classes).

Just buyer beware, make sure that the programs you need to run work with which ever of the FOUR versions of Vista are installed in your CPU. You will more than likely need to purchase upgrades. If you do, just bite the bullet and buy premium.

I think that the programs where not ready for the market when released. There are way too many kinks and not near the number of downloadable patches to allow it to run programs you already own.

In the end, it works, but the cost was way too much compared to XP.