Facing the full horror of a horrible Windows Vista review

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 15 May 2007 12:10

Opinion and Analysis

So far, ‘Fuzzy Logic’ (that’s me) has been using Vista Ultimate full-time since RC1 – that’s well over 9 months and far, far longer than two weeks. On the whole, we're glad we moved and we'd never go back to XP!

So far, we've found that it works better than Windows XP, dozens of things that were annoyingly different are now taken for granted and actually appreciated, and several things that worked a bit flakily at first were fixed with driver updates that became available. iTWire colleague Angus Kidman has written a review of Windows Vista based on his experiences using it on a Lenovo laptop and two weeks of use.

Titled ‘Facing the full horror of Windows Vista’, it’s an extremely puzzling review, as it’s almost the opposite of the experience I’ve had using Vista – all the way back since Vista RC1.

That isn’t to say we haven’t had our issues with Windows Vista – our open letter to Bill Gates written earlier this year shows our clear displeasure with the state of driver availability at the time. Yet slowly, but surely, drivers have become available, causing much initial angst to have long ago dissipated. The following is my version of Kidman’s review, written in much the same style, except reflecting my almost opposite experiences.

We should point out at the start that we migrated to Windows Vista under less than optimal circumstances. We didn’t bother to do anything so mundane as wait for the final release but jumped right in with Vista RC1, to see what any early release showstopper bugs were like and to track their progress to being fixed.

We upgraded an existing Fujitsu Core Duo Tablet PC that had been factory pre-loaded with Windows XP Tablet, but opted to create RC1 in a new partition, so we could avoid the upgrade nightmares that will plague anyone who decides to upgrade Vista over an existing XP installation – that, at least, is common knowledge.

After all, a clean installation is always the best way to experience a new operating system. And we've deliberately loaded all kinds of software on the machine, to maximize the chance of seeing how different types of XP software handled the RC1 environment.

Naturally, when Vista went to RTM status at the end of November, the incredibly seldom used XP partition and the new Vista RC1 partition were wiped from the computer and replaced entirely with Vista Ultimate RTM. We're writing this article (and hundreds of others) on the Vista machine, and have been using it happily for months, with only a few driver issues preventing certain features from working optimally, although they were hardly showstoppers, more annoyances at the time.

But today, as of May 15, all the driver issues that we previously faced (and complained about publicly) have disappeared, making the Vista experience even more enjoyable. The nicest thing we can say about Microsoft's newest operating system is that it’s the best one they’ve ever produced, and we would never, ever go back to any previous version.

For starters, we’ve had no problems with speed, having made sure to order 2Gb of memory when getting the Fujitsu Tablet about a year ago, because we knew Vista was coming and because we knew 2Gb of memory would be the order of the day.

What about Kidman's other issues, and our own experiences? Please read onto page 2 for our strong rebuttal, in our experiences at least, of the problems Kidman has faced.