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by Stan Beer   
Wednesday, 06 February 2008
I might as well come right out and say it; Windows Vista works well for me. No doubt some readers will flame me and accuse me of being a Microsoft shill but this is a conclusion I've reached independently after some months of using Vista under real working conditions.

Like many other journalists who attended the Microsoft product launch in January 2007 I received a copy of Vista Ultimate in my press pack. However, after hearing horror stories about sluggish performance, a severe lack of device drivers and the maddening User Account Control (UAC) security system, I deliberately held back from loading it on my personal production machine.

Instead I loaned my copy to a colleague to do a review. His report was less than encouraging, although I shouldn't have been surprised because he is a Linux advocate and his review machine, although new, was probably a bit under powered for Vista.

And herein lays the crux of the matter - Vista needs plenty of grunt to run. Microsoft has never held back from saying this, although the so-called minimum specs are a joke. You definitely need more than 1GB to run Vista. Based on what I've seen from the two copies I have running in my office, 2GB of RAM plus, say, a 128MB graphics card will give you acceptable performance.

My production computer has 4GB RAM and a 256MB graphics card and is what most people would call a very highly configured box. Yet it only cost me AUD$1200 from my local system builder, which is hardly a fortune.

Wary of Vista, I originally loaded Windows Home Server and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) in a dual boot configuration onto my production box. However, Windows Home Server proved to be less than satisfactory in a number of ways. The user interface was less than average and the performance was woeful - why I don't know.

Undaunted, I decided to use what I saw as an opportunity to move to Linux. Ubuntu showed great promise. It was fast, the user interface was intuitive and it was very stable. However, it suffered and still does suffer in my opinion from one major disadvantage. And this for me is an insurmountable problem at present.



 
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