Facing the full horror of a horrible Windows Vista review

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 15 May 2007 11:10

Opinion and Analysis

Booting up is marginally faster than with XP, but it’s definitely not slower. User Account Control, or UAC, has been barely noticed – sure it’s there, and pops up every now and then when we want to make some changes to settings the average user should probably be careful about changing, but it has in no way been notably slower than our previous machine, despite the fact that the new model has twice as much memory and a much faster processor. Basic tasks like email and launching applications have performed much the same as with XP – no particular speed boosts, but not slower, either.

Office 2007 may have, from memory, crash at least a couple of times, but we’re struggling to remember when that was. There have been a few Office 2007 updates in that time as well, so if there were problems, it would seem that Microsoft has fixed them, both thanks to the improved error logging processes and procedures in Office 2007, and through the Windows Update environment that, coupled with Microsoft Update, automatically updates both Vista and other Microsoft software.

As for Kidman’s complaints that networking isn’t working on his machine, with Kidman saying that “the lack of anything approaching basic network functionality is our biggest complaint” is incredibly hard to believe.

Networking in Windows has never, ever, ever been better. It’s the most pleasant, seamless and frankly incredible networking experience we’ve ever encountered. We’ve been able to connect to Ethernet networks, the pre-Wimax systems of Unwired and iBurst though Ethernet, USB and PCMCIA connections, to a variety of 3.5G HSDPA PCMCIA cards and USB modems and through 3.5G mobile phones via a cable connected to the phone and to a USB port. Naturally, we’ve been connecting via numerous Wi-Fi networks as well, so whatever problems Kidman is experiencing on his computer have most definitely not been replicated over here.

Indeed, the only ‘networking’ problem we’ve had is in using an Ethernet connected ‘shared storage’ hard drive, which isn’t seeing the contents of that hard drive even though it works perfectly well under XP.

But in defense of Vista and the drive itself, there have been updates for the drive that haven’t been applied, and which would (likely) fix the problem, although the urgency to get that particular drive working has not been intense and is actually something we planned on getting nailed down this week.

As for having to make multiple phone calls and emails to Microsoft support – the phone hasn’t needed to be picked up once. Sure, we’ve visited online forums to find out about the availability (or otherwise) of drivers, but any problems we initially experienced have all melted away, as we predicted would happen.

And as for IE7, the biggest gripe is that every now and then, IE7 just decides it can’t handle all the tabs we have open, so it crashes and closes down. Sadly it doesn’t ‘restore the session’ as Firefox does, so we’ve more or less ditched IE7 for most things, and like Kidman, have found that Firefox is a much better browser.

Of course, Firefox crashes too, from time to time, but the ‘restore session’ option is a lifesaver. If Microsoft were to offer such a feature in IE7, we’d be much more inclined to use it, especially as IE7 has a ‘hand’ cursor, much like in Adobe Acrobat, that allows much better and easier scrolling of web pages – a feature also present in Outlook 2007 for reading emails. It’s a feature sorely missed in Firefox.

Vista certification has also proven effectively meaningless, as Kidman has discovered. Why? Our reasons are different to his. Just about every piece of software we’ve tried has run without issues, although one or two needed the ‘compatibility’ settings turned on. We’ve downloaded plenty of software from the Internet, and by and large, it has all worked, much to our surprise and happiness. That said, an old Lexmark printer refused to work, and promised drivers ‘at the end of the month’. That was last month, April, and drivers have since arrived.

We could go on about our fantastic Vista experience, about the much nicer interface in Windows Explorer, the wonderful search functionality that we use every day and couldn’t live without (despite Google’s Desktop Search being, from memory, a bit faster at finding things), the arbitrary changes to menu names that are now second nature and which are expected with any new Microsoft operating system, even the nicer font that just makes the interface look more modern.

But the bottom line is that if we had shares in Microsoft, we'd be demanding that hardware partners get off their backsides and produce more drivers, for there are still companies out there who think it’s OK to take endless time to produce Vista drivers. Not everyone can just afford to go and buy new hardware.

That said, drivers have been steadily emerging, making us much happier campers than when we wrote an open letter to Bill Gates. We don’t know what your experiences have been like, but reading through those of Angus Kidman, and having read through much on the Internet, and knowing our own experience, we know that your mileage will undoubtedly have varied.

Nevertheless, we have helped a number of friends buy entire new computers and have transitioned them effectively completely seamlessly over to Vista, and all those friends are all happy campers, and would never go back to XP.

We can’t speak for you, and feel for you (and indeed poor Angus) if your experiences haven’t been as plain sailing as ours. But to say dismiss Vista as a steaming pile o’ operating system mess is just plain wrong. We use it every day, and love it. For us, Vista put the ‘ex’ in XP. We’re ex-XP users, and we couldn’t be happier.

Just bring on Vista SP1 so all those using that as an excuse to upgrade don’t have that excuse any more!