I am late to the party again — this time it’s a blanket party — in honor of Windows Vista. That, of course, is because I wouldn’t put it on my computers if I was paid to. I use it on a daily basis in my office, or at least I have for the last month, since the abused Duron spun out of control and crashed into the sidewall. In its place a gleaming new eMachines J4482 was installed, with Vista on its back like the proverbial monkey.
I don’t have much that’s positive to say about it, mostly because it hasn’t really impressed me yet, and because I only use it superficially — browsing with a portable version of Firefox, typing documents in Word, and so forth. Beyond that, I haven’t really had a chance to delve deep.
Of the little that I see, and of the few things I have made it do, I am not terribly impressed. The funky program-switching feature that flips through applications like pages in a folder? It’s okay, but it doesn’t hold a candle to spinning your desktop like a cube. Desktop widgets? Meh. It looks to me like a KDE knockoff, although I can imagine that the counter-argument is that KDE is a Vista knockoff. Chicken or egg, if you ask me.
I guess it gets the job done. I haven’t run into that “confirm or deny” behavior that everyone mentions, but again, I only use two programs, and neither of them is really running a risk of bringing the entire system down. It does disappoint me that, for all the power and technology that the system has, Vista feels a little sluggish. As an example, if the machine enters power-saving mode while at the login screen, it takes two seconds for the mouse to come back to life.
Little things like that seem to hinder its day-to-day functions. Every login brings out a system profile screen, although that might be a feature and not a bug, and I just don’t know how to turn it off. 🙄 And so forth, and so on.
In any case, my lackluster beratement of “one of the worst products in history” isn’t serving anyone. I will only say that it does the job, albeit rather begrudgingly, and seems heavy on glitz while light on performance.
Of course, coming from someone who uses Linux on a 100Mhz laptop as the primary machine in the house, that might be the worst thing I could say. 😐
You just need adjustments and a really fast PC – dual core Pentium Ds and 800 MB of RAM should do. I find KDE and Vista to be knockoffs of each other. We had desktop gadgets since OS7! Both look like barf, Vista I can stand in Classic, but I prefer GTK anyday.
I would be running Linux right now, but since it collapsed by Midori crashing the printer drivers, making everything act bonkers. I had to use the preinstalled Linux. 😦
“typing documents in Word”? Why not use Writer? There’s a portable version of OpenOffice.org here: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable
Or perhaps the portable version of AbiWord would be more your speed, as it were: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/abiword_portable
your not the only one feeling the Vista bloat. I have friend that always comes to me for help with his lappy,and yes, it’s vista. considering his lappy has higher specs than my desktop that i’m using now, that darn vista lappy is so sluggish. i bet if it has zenwalk or xubuntu on that lappy, it will fly. i think a kde4 linux distro is way better than any vista install.
I run Vista quite well, and use it for my home recording studio and gaming. Of course, I run it on a Q6600 system with 4GB RAM and a 512 MB video card. It runs reasonably fast now that I have the hardware RAID set up. What’s the deal, everyone? //sarcasm, of course…
Hey, thanks for the link to the Signpost. I like what you’re writing.
ben
Vista isn’t amazing, but after all the updates Microsoft has pushed out, about the worst you can say about it as this point is that DRM is stupid and that it’s rather sluggish. (Though I can’t say I remember having to deal with a system profile screen on login.)
Windows 7 removes the sluggishness and streamlines a few things here and there (I especially like the homage to NetworkManager), and it’s really rather amazing how much nicer it is.
Of course, neither of them can hold a candle to Linux in any area aside from a vast number of binary blob drivers and a vast number of popular closed source 3rd party software. But at least they’re more secure than your average Windows XP machine.