Vista Report Card

Windows Vista- a Report Card Vic Laurie http://tips.vlaurie.com

Vista Comes of Age
Released for home use Jan. 30, 2007
Service Pack 1 now out
Service Pack 2 on the way
Windows XP no longer generally available
System builders, “netbooks”, downgrades
Hardware drivers now more or less available (but not for older equipment)
New PCs pretty much Vista capable

Vista’s Reception
General consensus has been lukewarm at best
People expected more after 5 years of development
PC World chose it as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007
SP1 not seen as a big enough change

Is Vista Bad?
Vista is not a bad system but it is definitely disappointing
Microsoft made many promises that were not kept and it over-hyped Vista
Vista was late but was still released too soon
The system is too complicated and slow
The hardware requirements are very heavy
Drivers weren’t ready
Security measures heavy-handed
No compelling new feature, except possibly security
It costs too much

Study of Vista Resource Usage
“ Aside from the obvious fact that they run slower than they did under Windows XP (in many cases, by 40 percent or more), there are some fascinating changes going on under the hood. If you compare the typical workload of a Windows-based system, breaking it down by per-process thread count and CPU utilization, you see that a Windows Vista PC is using roughly 21 percent more CPU cycles per thread than a comparably configured Windows XP PC. This is in addition to the fact that Vista is spinning almost twice as many execution threads …”
http://weblog.infoworld.com/sentinel/archives/2008/05/are_you_ready_f.html

Recommended System Requirements

Vista Annoyances
User Account Control (UAC)

More Annoyances
Many operations are slower
File copying really slow- better in SP1

More Annoyances
Boots are slow
Hard drive churns a lot
Operations in background such as indexing, defragging, Windows Defender
Menus gone from Windows Explorer
Other things rearranged
IE7 security can be heavy-handed
Some older software doesn’t work

On Vista but Also Available for XP
Internet Explorer 7
Windows Defender
Windows Media Player 11
.NET 3.0 Framework
Sidebar- equivalent in a number of free programs
Desktop search

Anything Good About Vista?
Better security
A lot of increased defenses underneath
Internet Explorer runs with restricted system access
Parental controls
Fancy graphics- a matter of taste
Many new tools for system administrators (but of little interest for home users)
Wireless networking easier (maybe)
Searching and file management easier (possibly)
Better backup (but not in home edition)

Why the Lukewarm Reception?
Too many broken promises
Released before it was really ready
Drivers weren’t ready
Requires too many resources
Nothing really compelling
For many, XP is good enough
If released today, Vista would probably get better reception

FWIW, My Advice
Don’t rush to upgrade an existing Windows XP system
If more performance is needed, add RAM
Add some of the new features that work on both systems
Wait to buy a new PC until Windows 7
If you need a new PC now, present models work fine with Vista
Consider a Mac if you do not use a lot of specialized software or hardware

What’s Ahead
Service pack 2 for Vista
Sometime in early 2009?
Roll up patches since SP1
Burn Blu-ray natively
Windows 7
Mid 2009?
Pre-beta just released to developers

What is Windows 7?
Based on pre-beta release, will be built on Vista, a kind of grand Service Pack
One new feature is multi-touch
May be a lighter OS- some features removed
Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker removed
Faster than Vista
Somewhat different interface

THE END

Vista Report Card

by Joel May on Nov 21, 2008

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