Windows Vista Review – Part Six (MY OPINIONS)

Now it is time to give you my opinions in the final part of my Windows Vista Review. My opinions on Vista are varied, there are parts I like and parts I hate, you’ll here about these throughout this review.

 

My Favourite Part of Vista

My favourite part of Windows Vista has to be the new interface, although I am not running Aero itself, the basic interface is a massive improvement although it gets a little confusing sometimes which is the active window because there is little difference between an active and inactive titlebar.

The new start menu looks much better and the sidebar makes the whole user interface look fresh and modern. The black taskbar isn’t as bold as the blue in XP which is good and the new start menu button is a thing of beauty.

 

My Worst Part of Vista

The worst part of Vista for me is the security, I have been using Vista for about 2 and a half weeks now and I am still getting bubbles appearing from my system tray every now and then asking me to look into my security settings, whats wrong? Well, i don’t have automatic updates enabled, I dont want automatic updates enabled.

UAC (or User Account Protection) is, well was, a pain until I turned it off, why should I need to give permission to send a file to my recycle bin, it’s lucky I don’t password protect my area else I would be having to type my password in time and time again.

 

Advantages

So what are the advantages of Vista that are different from Windows XP, well:

• The new aero interface makes your time using the PC more enjoyable although I dont think to many people would keep this theme on because it will slow down their PC to much.
• Search Capabilities, a desktop search program is offered by most large search engines like Google and Ask Jeves, but having it integrated is a lot easier plus it doesn’t slow down your computer like Google Desktop or Windows Live Desktop Search.
• Start Menu Search, this is a great feature, well it was when I started using Vista, now it is really slow, I waited nearly a minute for it to find the program I requested, it would have been quicker using the convential way.
• Bundled applications, there are masses of applications bundled in with Windows Vista meaning that you can carry out most tasks without having to install software.
• Live previews. This is a handy feature which allows you to see a preview of the presentation, spreadsheet etc. in the icon, similar to thumbnails.
• Speech Recognition to control your computer “COMPUTER LIGHTS”, we move into the sci-fi world of Star Trek.

 

Disadvantages

There are many disadvantages to Windows Vista, a few are shown below:

• Driver support is crap, trust me, if you install Vista expect at least 3 or 4 devices not to work, as I say to a lot of people, why not just make it compatible with XP drivers. Oh, and don’t expect to many companies to write Vista driver right away, because not many people will be using it.
• Slow, startup time is ridiculous, expect to be sitting there for at least a minute before doing a single thing, and thats without applications launching at start up (virus checkers and the like).
• You need a decent machine, well that’s what Microsoft says, I’m running it fine on a P3 1GHz with 512MB RAM, 30GB harddrive and only 4MB, yes 4MB of video memory. Obviously, I’m not running Aero so if you want to run it get a bigger graphics card and maybe some more memory.
• Buggy, as you would expect with a new product it has a lot of bugs and problems, but hang on a minute, they have had over 5 years to make this, so there is no excuse this time.
• Installing programs. You will most likely come across programs that wont install, the most famous of these is Nero, you’ll need to get Nero 7 to stand any chance of using it. There are also problems with Norton (apparently).

 

Conclusion

Windows Vista isn’t all bad, I use one computer and on that computer is Windows Vista, it is now the only operating system I use, so it must keep me hanging on somehow. I would however, not recommend it to home and office users yet, if you get a free upgrade then fair enough install it but be prepared to have trouble, I would however, recommend it to computer enthuisiasts like me, because it is so much better than XP.

 

Well that’s it, this was my final part of my Windows Vista review, but keep coming back and look at my other reviews. I have also set up a Windows Vista forum, so go to there and discuss the new OS and if you have any problems with Vista make sure that you post your problem there, you can find it at: http://mswindowsvista.informe.com

Thankyou for reading

 

Simon North, 19th February 2007