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04/20/2007
I finally managed to get my hands on a copy of the new Windows Vista Ultimate and after a week of using it, I am
not impressed. The whole thing is not only buggy, but I’ve seen no real innovation in the operating system. For those of
you who have read my Vista Preview article, some of the things have changed, some have not.
A few specs to get us started:
The Install Process
I was impressed with some aspects this time around on the install process. It went very smoothly and Microsoft has
streamlined it more than when I was beta testing it. The new interface for the installation looks a whole lot more
like the Linux and Macintosh installers that I am used to. Microsoft did a pretty decent on job on making this user
friendly. However, the whole thing takes far longer than I think it should. I had to wait over an hour for it to install
to a point where I had a desktop. I was hoping that it would take a whole lot less time to install than the beta. No
such luck.
Another thing I was impressed with is that I only had to install it one time to make it properly multi-boot with Windows
XP and Fedora Core 6. My attempts last October left me ready to throw Vista out the door, but this time it went very
smoothly and caused me even less headaches than just trying to get Windows XP and Fedora to dual boot. I applaud them for
doing a good job of making this task fairly painless.
On a bad note, the base installation takes up way too much room. My hard drive currently has 17.9GB full. I’ll give Microsoft
the benefit of the doubt and say that with the installation of Office 2007 Ultimate edition, 2 browsers, an Antivirus,
a messenger service and a dozen pictures or so, I’ve taken up about 1.1GB of my hard drive. I’m being very generous here
because I think if I add it up, it comes out to just barely one gigabyte. That means that Windows is taking up 16.8GB of space
just for a basic install! To put that in perspective, Windows XP is taking up less than 4GB with SP2 installed and Fedora
Core 6 is taking up less than 4GB as well. What does Windows Vista do that it requires that much space for a base install?
It is outrageous.
Using Vista, The UAC
The first thing I want to talk about is the User Account Control or UAC. This is Microsoft’s ingenious idea to help
protect the computer from getting malicious software installed on it. However I do not think that Microsoft has spent
much time with the actual users of their product, because every one of them that I have met so far will just ignore the
warning message that comes up and just allow the software to have access and install anyway.
Thus the UAC is rendered completely useless. After just 20 minutes of using Vista, the UAC had come up at least a
dozen times. This left me very irritated with the whole thing and if it had not been for the easy access to turn off
the UAC, I would have been ready to toss the entire OS and go back to XP. Here is a fun trivia fact that has to do with UAC.
If you turn off UAC, it disables Protected Mode in IE7, which is what protects IE7 from picking up all that spyware that IE
is so prone to opening up your computer to. Fortunately IE7 is very unimpressive and I don’t use it. It is back to Firefox
and Opera for me.
Using Vista, What A Hog!
A memory hog that is. Not only does Vista take up a lot of hard drive space, but it uses a lot of your resources too. With
absolutely nothing running except task manager, not even the antivirus, Vista is running between 700MB to 900MB of memory
usage and between 65% and 100% CPU usage at and idle state. Honestly, does it take that much to run their fancy new interface?
Apparently it does. This extreme resource usage is very apparent when running programs, as even ones that are said to be on the
Vista Software Compatibility List take forever to load and are very prone to lag. Lag is completely unacceptable when you
have 3 GB of RAM.
Using Vista, Windows Search
I have heard a lot about the new search feature included with Vista. This search feature is supposed to be the alternative
to the Google Desktop Search, giving instant results when you search for a file. However, this feature does not just
fall short of my expectations; it is by far the worst desktop search I have ever used in my life. It still barely works at
all. I realize that the computer has to index the files before it can find them, but my expectation that after a week of being
turned on non-stop, the whole computer should be indexed turned out to be very wrong. Google Desktop took less than 7 hours to
index 450GB of data. The new Windows search has had over a week and it still does not index anything on my other drives.
I will give it a little credit though, anything in the Documents folder or on the desktop, it can find. This part of Vista
is a complete piece of garbage.
Using Vista, Eye Candy
If there is one thing that Vista definitely sports, it is eye candy. The whole OS is loaded with it. I will not bore you
with all the details of the new Aero interface, if you want that you can go read my Vista Preview article. However, I will
note that they have fixed the previewing feature in the interface. I have not gotten a single black preview yet. Okay, on to
better things. One of my favorite features of XP was the slideshow. Vista has taken that feature to the next level. I
am very impressed with it. They now have 12 different themes for your slide show as well as 6 new options for controlling
the slide show, including the speed of the show and a shuffle feature. Several of the themes for it allow you to view multiple
pictures at once and the whole thing is very tastefully done. All of these options are also available for use with the
pictures screensaver. The downside to all of this however, is that the slide show now takes more than twice as long to
load now. Slow load time aside, this has to be my favorite new feature of Vista.
However the one feature of XP that I absolutely hate, Microsoft was nice enough to bring over to Vista.
That feature is the Welcome Screen. This feature drives me nuts because not only is it slow, it doesn’t
allow for the kind of security I desire in a computer. When I lock my XP box, the result is instantaneous.
With Vista this sometimes takes up to 10 seconds and even longer than that when it comes to the unlocking
process. I want my data to be there as soon as I put in my password, not 10 seconds later. Even worse, I have
yet to find a way to turn this terrible feature off. This alone I believe is one of the biggest flaws in
the user experience for Vista.
Using Vista, The Bugs!
Within hours of installing it, the bugs were starting to crawl out of the system. The first one I noticed was the
power saving options. It was initially set to balanced mode. Normal procedure, it will turn off the monitor after 20
minutes. I can deal with that. However I don’t like my computer going into standby mode. It drives me nuts, so I switched
the computer over to high performance mode, that’s why I’ve got a desktop isn’t it? The system still says
that the monitor will turn off after 20 minutes. This worked till the first restart. Now, no matter what setting I
have it at, the monitor will not shut off unless I manually poke the power button.
Another one I found was with the CD/DVD burning feature. It doesn’t work. It prepped my disc for the data,
then when I tried to add the data, which was about 20 pictures, it took about 20 minutes to attempt to burn the data
to the disc, then completely stopped responding. After I got that task stopped, the rest of the computer started to
systematically die. I lost my ability to right click, then a few minutes later, I lost the ability to open my drives and
folder, then I lost the ability to even open the start menu. I wound up having to hit the restart button on the tower to
bring the computer back alive again.
The third bug I found is not really a bug, but a whole collection of bugs. The Vista OS seems to have processes
randomly crash and the whole thing tends to lock up. I have not gotten any blue screens, but I have had it go to a
completely black screen that even the control alt delete will not fix. Various parts of the OS crash frequently and when
one part crashes, it all crashes, often for no apparent reason.
Final Thoughts
After only a week, my view of Vista is not a very happy one. The whole operating system so far seems to be a bloated
Macintosh themed version of Windows XP. It is very unstable and I would not recommend storing any vital data on it.
I would even go as far as saying this is one of the worst things Microsoft has created since Windows ME. Here’s looking
towards 2009 when Windows 7 is set to be released, hopefully with some actual innovation involved in it.
Rating: 1/5
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