Introducing Windows XP an operating system so ahead of it's time it better Vista! Well, I managed to live/struggle/work with Vista for nearly a whole month. After the novelty of the new theme and window effects wore off, which took all of a few days, the problems with Vista became apparent.

XP betters vista in several ways, performance of games, better drivers, better stability, better support, better theme, better organisation of menu's and GUI's. Vista betters XP with, it's tabbed switching, the thumbnail of closed applications, tighter integration of sound card drivers/applications and of course Mahjong Titans providing you have the business or ultimate edition.

In the time that I ran Vista for I had no fewer than five BSOD's (Blue Screens of Death). Lets compare this with the three BSOD's I have had whilst running XP for several years, now I know this is possibly and perhaps most likely a driver issue but for the time being at least this is totally unacceptable. Then there's the issue of performance, Vista doesn't seem to like running on anything less than 2GB of RAM. I have no need for 2GB of RAM, Linux does not need it, no game I own needs it and I'm certainly not buying another 1GB just for an OS when I can use XP with 1GB of RAM for free. On to the games performance, I'm not much of a gamer but Windows exists solely on my machine for gaming and programming. Gaming was awful, every game I tried had serious performance issues, again this could be due to drivers or perhaps the 1GB of RAM but again, why not just run XP? I did not spend £630 on a computer upgrade to have it perform only as well as my previous system did! Visual Studio was given a new feature under Vista. Random crashes. Yes this Microsoft product is marked as being incompatible with Vista! and the crashes seem to back this statement up.

The theme, what has gone on here? Too much "shine" to be a serious theme. "Last-ability" or how long you can look at a theme without it becoming "old" is of the utmost importance. I will admit that upon first glance I was wowed by the design but a few days later I was longing for something more toned down and easier on the eye so I switched back to the classic Windows look which gave quite a surprising performance boost even for a pretty fast Dual Core system. I was able to skin Vista with the standard uxtheme.dll patching method however I could only find one skin available that was just as much to my disliking as the default anyway. I also tried the "Royale" skin from XP Media Centre but Vista decided it would install it but wouldn't use it even though it was a selectable option.

Oh, how I love Creative's Beta Audigy 2 drivers. I won't go into detail but lets just say they are the worst drivers I have used to date (save perhaps the ATi Linux drivers?). Lots of sound problems, game crashes, audio editors that would not work and so on. The alone is reason enough for me to move back to XP to be honest. They are just abysmal and, according to what I have heard, Creative have no plans to update them. I seriously hope this is incorrect.

So what has it taken Microsoft so long to do? Bugger all to be fair, a reorganisation of menu's, a more annoying security permissions "feature", some ridiculous requirements, worse performance now just add in a few cheap desktop effects and a theme and icon set that's just to "flash" for "Last-ability" and you have Vista. Oh wait, I forgot the gadgets. I wont go into those "gimmicks" because they are not worth writing about nobody needs a "speedometer" on their desktop for their CPU usage. Vista finally allows you to delete the recycle bin from your desktop without some registry hack (at last!), desktop icons are pointless but Microsoft haven't realised this along with most of their customers who have yet to be shown why.

What hasn't it taken Microsoft so long to do. Include theme support, how hard can this be? There has been no improvement on how configurable the taskbar is. Take a look at KDE or Gnome's panel not OSX's dock (Good Lord!), Users should be able to place things where they want them. Font size, font size, font size! Oh what a joke, why can you not change the font size on Microsoft Operating Systems, you can instead only change the sizes of a selection places where fonts are used. So change the DPI? Yeah Microsoft managed to bugger up that option too, changing the DPI also set's the "bugger up my icons my making them look like they are drawn in gigantic centimetre square pixels" option to true.

I moved to Vista in spite of all the nay saying and criticism surrounding it with an open mind. I was initially fairly impressed until the problems became clear and that problem was that it's not as good as XP. Inevitably it will improve but to be honest even after doing so I don't see it as being worth the money.

2 Comments

achaycock Location: Joined: 16/07/06

Currently chuckling, especially when you consider that I have held off from installing Vista precisely because I knew these problems would exist. nVidia drivers for Vista have currently come under enormous criticism, though today of all days nVidia have obliged us with some new ones that should fix a lot (though not all) of the current problems. Ironically ATi have proven to be on the ball and their drivers have been received quite positively. Creative will probably review their Audigy drivers simply due to the fact that there has been a huge outcry over the lack of support. Personally I hate Creative drivers, but as yet I can't move away from their products due to the poor selection of alternatives for gaming. What's really bugging me about Creative is their lack of Linux drivers for the X-Fi. I couldn't care less if they're closed source or not, I just want my bloody X-Fi to work in Ubuntu. A recent study by IBM shows the sweet spot for Vista in terms of RAM is actually 4Gb! 2Gb is acceptable, the equivalent of 1Gb for Windows XP. Fine for the majority of people but not for multitasking computer hogs like myself. The key is the pre-fetch functionality in the core of the OS. It might have been worth trying it with a flash based disk drive to see if that provided any benefits. The basic Operating System is actually rather good and there are many features under the skin that make the upgrade worthwhile. It seems however that many manufacturers are having a huge problem with the new driver model and personally I'm waiting at least a year before I bother moving over to it while I wait for other people to work on the solutions to the many niggles and problems. I will then learn from them and implement their fixes or modifications right from the start. If I had the time (like I did when XP came out) I would have been experimenting myself, but I have only just reached a point where I feel I can make XP behave mostly the way I want it to. Be interesting if you try it out in 12 months time and compare to how things have come along since. By the way, on another note, have you bought a new PSU yet? Surely by now...

Chris Location: West Midlands, UK Joined: 24/03/05

Well yes, I did expect issues. Basically I just wanted to test the OS. Stupidly I couldn't be bothered to create another partition and opted to upgrade from XP. As you say in time many problems will be fixed but even so I don't see the advantage of running Vista, I think it remains to be seen if it truly is more secure and the extra features it has are certainly nothing I would miss. Plus I have no need for 2GB of RAM right now and I certainly wouldn't buy some just to run Vista lol. I can't believe 4GB is the sweet spot! In my mind 2GB for an OS is totally unacceptable. I was tempted to try it with a flash based device and that may have gone a long way towards helping but if it did I would still have to spend money to sort out the problem. I will certainly try Vista again sometime, well if I have some other reason to get 2GB of RAM, but really I can't see my self ever moving to it unless forced to. As with every next incarnation of Windows they have higher requirements and run slower than the last version, if XP does all I want a Windows OS to do and does it faster then why upgrade? As for the PSU, well, I haven't exactly got round to buying another yet I really need to, I have tempted fate for too long!

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