Vista: Why move to SP1?

Stan Beer
Monday, 24 March 2008 06:58

Opinion and Analysis

For the past month all I've been hearing are moans and groans about how bad Vista is, how badly managed the distribution of SP1 has been, and how bad SP1 itself is. Well, for all the nostalgia freaks who long for the days of Windows XP, Windows 2000, NT4 or even Win 3.11, please go down to a computer swap meet, buy yourself an old clunker box loaded with DOS 6 and give the rest of us with new hardware a break. Vista is a damned good operating system just as it is.

Mac zealots and Linux lovers you don't really need to read on because this article isn't for you. Many of us 'Windoze' users know how wonderful Macs are, how superior Leopard is, how cool Steve Jobs and his alter ego in the Mac ads are, and how backward we all are for just 'not getting it'. However, there are already more Vista users than users of all the various flavours of Mac OS (and Linux) combined and 'Windoze' in total is the defacto standard OS worldwide.

For the critics who say Windows XP is better than Vista, I say garbage. Until mid-2007, I was an XP SP2 user and I was experiencing all the usual problems that a Windows user gets from an OS that has been outgrown by a new generation of applications that require an increasing amount of system resources.

My memories of the latter days of XP SP2 on both my desktops and laptops was one of frustration caused by periodic system slow-downs, freezes, unwakeable hibernations and the occasional blue-screen. Even though I always had highly configured boxes, XP SP2 just wasn't up to the task of heavy file sharing due to peer-to-peer apps and those horrible resource-intensive security packages.

I now have Vista running on three desktops and a notebooks and everything is running fine with none of the previous problems I had with XP SP2. All of the PCs have Core 2 Duo processors. 

My principal desktop has 4G of RAM and a 256M graphics card, another has 2G and 128M graphics card, and one desktop and the notebook, both with 2G and no graphics card, run Vista just fine. True, for graphics intensive applications, you really need a graphics card for things to run smoothly - eg. try running 3-D chess without a real graphics card, some integrated graphics solutions just don't cut it. However, for most applications - and certainly business applications - 2G and no card is just fine.

But what about all the problems with drivers?