Stan Beer
Monday, 24 March 2008 07:58
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
From my experience, at my first attempt I had exactly the
same problems that most of us get but conveniently forget about later
whenever we upgrade to a new OS - some of the old things in the new
system didn't work. For me, it was just one thing, my trusty four year
old Canon LBP 810 laser printer.
The interesting thing is that on my primary
desktop, I have both Vista and Ubuntu 7.10 installed in a dual-boot
configuration and there is no driver available for the LBP 810 for
either. But what the heck, I needed a new printer anyway. So I got
myself an HP Laserjet 3052 multi-function box and, while HP was busily
working away on getting its drivers ready (which is now available for
Vista and is superb) both Vista and Ubuntu had resident stop gap
drivers that did the basic jobs of printing and copying.
Upon upgrading to Vista from XP SP2, I noticed three things: a nicer
interface, a more robust OS, and better performance. Yes, better
performance! I upgraded my 2G Dell Latitude 620 notebook without
changing any hardware specs and everything ran faster and smoother with
Vista.
Oh yes, there was all this vitriol I kept hearing about the 'maddening'
Vista UAC (User Account Control). I knew I could simply turn it off
but truthfully it has just never bothered me enough to do so. In fact -
shock, horror - I actually think it's a pretty good thing to have a box
that pops up whenever you want to change settings in the control panel,
run software at administrator level, and so on.
Despite my own positive experiences with Vista on four different
machines, all I keep hearing are complaints of what a dog Vista is and
what a monumental stuff-up Microsoft has made of its release from
fellow journalists, bloggers and posters to the blogosphere. I don't
doubt for one minute that some of these complaints are valid. I also
don't doubt that many arose from early adopters, while others have
arisen from users with inadequately configured hardware.
There's probably some truth to the belief that Microsoft, Intel and
hardware OEMs have all contributed to the problem by being a less than
truthful about what constituted a 'Vista capable' computer. That said,
maybe all the Vista haters have forgotten what an absolute dog XP was
until SP2 was released.
So what I have now are a number of computers all running Vista with
good performance. None are giving me any major issues at present that
need to be addressed urgently. So should I download Vista SP1 to
address the reported 551 issues that I didn't know I had?
