Your reviews: Windows Vista

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Here's my impressions of Windows Vista, after over a year of use.

In the time I've used it, Microsoft's Windows Vista has copped a lot of flak from a lot of users. I've seen plenty of comments noting how Vista was a mistake, it didn't meet expectations, and generally failed in all areas. Majority of users who have said these things, I believe, have failed to use Vista for more than two days. The truth is, Vista is a great OS.

I was an early adopter of Vista - Home premium in fact - as well as Office 2007. My original rig was a HP laptop, that had about a gig of ram and a 1.8GHz Dual Core CPU, which by most standards was just enough to run this particular distro.

I'll be the first to admit that the system requirements are out of reach for a number of older PC's, and even a lot of newer PC's struggled to meet and kind of performance expectation a lot of user's had. For me though, a clean install of Home Premium didn't have any major issues, however it wasn't without it's hiccups.

Driver support, which admittedly is the number one complaint both I and majority of users have about the OS, is quite poor. However, HP had setup a separate page with drivers for my particular hardware in advance of Vista's release, meaning install was generally a breeze. A couple of minor things didn't work, like my webcam and microphone, but with those exceptions, everything ran quite nicely.

Stepping away from the actual set up, let's discuss usability.

Vista was coined as somewhat of a next gen OS, said to take advantage of multi core CPU architecture and produce unrivaled performance and productivity against its competitors. Obviously alot of this was not fulfilled (another widespread complaint of the OS) but that's not to say it's a bad OS just for that.
I'll personally never go back to XP after using Vista, simply because of its usability.

One of the features I love to flaunt to my XP-using friends is the start search, which finds applications on the fly based on your entry into the search bar. Vista feels less like a business OS - menus are more fluid, navigation is easier, instructions are simplified.

Although it's not the quickest OS, it makes up for it with a generally smarter ease of use.

To top it off, is the obvious look of the GUI - Aero Glass just looks sexy. I'm not going to go into to much detail here - see it for yourself.

More importantly than usability and looks though, is Vista's support of applications.
Whilst more and more 3rd party packages are moving over to compatibility with the OS, the process is slow, and a number of users have marked this on there "things I hate about Vista" list.

It's even worse for 64-bit applications (I'm now running 64-Bit Ultimate) as there is little of no support at all in terms of 3rd party anti-virus and spyware products, or at least, from the decent one's theres not.
Application performance varies - some games run better on Vista, others are alot worse. General Word Processing and Data entry is quick, as is web browsing.

There are a couple of key points I'd like to make:

- Don't buy Ultimate. It's not worth it. Stick with Home Premium.
- If you're a Gamer, don't buy Vista. Although I can play games fine on my Vista Rig, it's because mine is quite high end. Low Spec Machine's beware.
- If you're looking for something intuitive and nice looking, Vista is your bag.
- Give the thing a chance. Too many people have been bashing this OS after only 5 minutes of use - be patient with it, download the updates, and I'm sure you'll never want to go back to XP

Overall, Vista has it's failings, but it's also a step up from XP once you look past the minor performance gripes. Usability is up, and application support is growing.

Don't bash it before you try it, because given enough time, I'm sure you'll love it as much as I do.

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