Stan Beer
Wednesday, 06 February 2008 16:40
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
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.
