Introduction

That Windows Vista is probably Microsoft’s most maligned operating systems to date, with the possible exception of Windows ME is basically undisputed. There was a lot of frustration regarding hardware requirements for Windows Vista. It was argued that Windows Vista has unreasonable hardware requirements and that a lot of people who might have upgraded could not on account of this.

(It seems Apple’s base has expressed similar frustrations with regard to Leopard, although in either case it begs the question: How obligated are operating system developers to supporting hardware that has reached or exceeded the limits of its useful life?)

Another issue regarding Vista was the inordinate amount of time that went into developing the latest incarnation of Windows NT. Six years between released is arguably a considerable period of time.

Performance was another issue at stake. Many people complained that Vista was slower, less responsive, and less intuitive than its predecessor.

Panned by numerous reviewers and slammed by Apple enthusiasts and Linux aficionados alike, Vista was given the same distinction as the Ford Edsel. Vista was a flop.

As an individual who works in the IT field, I had been asked by many about my opinions regarding Vista. My initial remarks mirrored that of the critics. It’s slow. It’s a resource hog. It’s superfluous. There was only one problem.

With the exception of some brief exposure to Vista with a RadioShack display machine, I had virtually no hands-on experience with Redmond’s operating system.

Installation

I decided that as Vista would eventually become the operating system many operations standardized on, it would behoove me to become familiar with it. So I searched online for the best rate I could find. I stumbled across RoyalDiscount.com and found the full install DVD for Windows Vista Business 32-bit for $219.99. As an early Christmas present to myself, I snapped this up before the deal expired and two days later my retail boxed copy arrived at my doorstep in Bright, Indiana.

I waited until I had an entire morning free to begin the install. After backing up all my old files and iTunes library to optical media, I opted for a clean install.

I think it is important to note that the results of a clean install are most likely more satisfactory than those of installing over an older version of Windows, especially if the installation you are placing Vista on top of is quite old. Irregularities in the registry that hitherto had not caused problems or system settings that were tweaked for best performance with XP may not mesh well with Vista. Unless your Windows XP install is just a few months old and you’ve done relatively few changes to your system, you are better off doing a clean install of Vista. CD media is cheap and you should have fairly recent backups anyway.

One thing that surprised me the most during the installation was how fast it was. The system I was installing on was a Compaq Presario V2311US notebook with a 1.6 Ghz AMD Turion64 processor, 1.5 GB of PC333 RAM, and a 60 GB hard disk. While no slouch, this certainly was not a high end system and the install took a quick 25 minutes or so. The installer detected all of my hardware with the exception of my audio controller without any hitch.

Upon booting, my wireless was up and running, so I went to HP’s support page for the audio drivers. I noticed with quite a bit of consternation that there were no Vista specific drivers for my audio controller. As having no audio was entirely unacceptable, I elicited the help of HP’s support staff who sent me two download links to driver files that did not work, although they insisted they were the right drivers. While the second support person was off finding “another link” I decided to help myself and try the XP drivers available on HP’s site, which fortunately worked like a charm.

Impressions

Despite many critics insistence to the contrary, Vista boots a lot faster than Windows XP did on this machine. Part of that, I am sure, is due to the fact that my XP install was over 2 1/2 years old and was weighed down from a bloated registry and list of startup items. Still, from my experience with working on relatively new or recently re-imaged Windows XP machines at work, Vista’s boot times have parity with those of its predecessor. My laptop (on a 5400 RPM hard drive) can go from a cold boot to a working desktop in twenty seconds or less. It can shutdown in roughly half that amount of time.

I haven’t experienced many issues with software compatibility save for my brief issue with the audio controller. While I was disappointed that the audio controller didn’t work out of the box, expecting Microsoft to have built in drivers for a Conexant audio controller that even Conexant is reticent in providing drivers for is a bit unreasonable.

There is a minor issue with iTunes 7.5 where the windows will occasionally appear blacked out (particularly when iTunes is first loaded) The phenomenon is transient and goes away after minimizing the window and then bringing it back up. I’m don’t know if it affects iTunes 7.6 as I have not yet availed myself of the upgrade.

I for one like the redesigned Start menu. I do less hunting and searching for my documents and applications than with Windows XP. While finding things in the Control Panel is different in some respects to XP, I have to say that Windows was due for some changes in this regard. The Windows XP Control Panel was a mess, and in some ways inferior to that of Windows 98. (Case in point, Windows 98 had a seperate Network applet for changing the computers name in a network, while in XP you had to find it under the System applet, which seemed a little unnatural to me.)

UAC was a good idea gone wrong. If UAC annoys the hell out of user such as myself to the point it makes me turn it off as I did, what good is it? I understand Microsoft including UAC for the purposes of security, but if they could make it a little more intuitive, allow the user to exclude certain actions as safe, and perhaps have a learning mode like SuSE Linux’s AppArmor., it would be more helpful.

I’m glad the integrated Windows Firewall finally prevents outbound connections in addition to inbound connections. A firewall that works only one way is almost as bad as no firewall at all. Now I don’t have to run ZoneAlarm anymore.

Conclusions

I won’t tell you that Windows Vista is perfect. It’s far from it. It has some annoyances that I had to… take care of *cough UAW cough*. Wordpad is pretty much useless except for RTF (and who uses RTF anymore?) The Run… dialog on the Windows XP Start menu that I as an IT professional have come to rely on is gone (good thing I know that WIN + R will bring it up). None of these are deal breakers though.

Windows Vista is a worthy upgrade from XP. The hardware requirements are scarcely more stringent than those of Mac OS X Leopard.

With the same token, if XP is providing you with all the capabilities that you require, don’t switch. Thats money you can put away for Windows 7 when it’s released in 2010