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My One Week Evaluation of Windows Vista   Rating: (4.7 / 10)    Views: 3,890

Submitted By: dgjengo on 2/11/2007. (  |  Share  |  Clikk It! )   

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My One Week Review of Windows Vista

Installation

So last week I got my hands on a copy of Windows Vista Business edition, which for the most part is like Windows Vista Ultimate only without the Media Center features and without the hard drive encryption.

The box I installed it on was an HP Pavilion ze5600 laptop, with a 2.8 GHz mobile Pentium 4 HT processor with 1GB RAM, and 128MB Shared Graphics, and a 120GB Hard drive.

The install went surprisingly smoothly. I chose to do an upgrade rather than a clean install. After about 4 hours or so and it was finished. Amazingly, all my programs still worked with the exception of Nero and a Cisco Virtual Private Network driver. The fix for Nero was just to reinstall it, which went smoothly.

The Virtual Private Network however, was significantly more annoying. A little “bubble” kept coming up in the lower right hand corner that said there was a driver compatibility issue. So then I clicked on the bubble and it gave me options for searching for a solution. I did so and no solution could be found, so then it gave me the option of closing the message. I did so and the bubble came back telling me there was a driver compatibility issue. This went on three or four times, before I realized that there was absolutely no way to make the bubble go away. I lived with this for three days until I finally figured out that it was the VPN driver that was the problem and I uninstalled the program.

However I needed this VPN software so I used a new handy dandy feature with Vista (although there are plenty of other software packages that do this for you), namely the ability to change partition sizes, even on the partition that the OS is installed on. So I adjusted the partition to allow me to create a second partition to load windows XP on for using my VPN to my work.



Graphics and User Interface

So then I began playing around with the graphical features, which are many and very cool (although you OSX users are likely to be less impressed, but before you go completely bashing Microsoft for copying Apple, consider that Apple completely copied Xerox in the beginning on user interface design, and more recently Apple completely copied 4.3BSD on their backend so really it’s just the name of the game. Someone comes up with something good and everyone copies). Unfortunately I could not get Vista to allow me to use the fully featured Aero environment as my computer didn’t apparently pass all the performance tests required.

Apparently according to a Microsoft TechNet article I read, administrators are supposed to have the ability to disable the “performance” restrictions, so that you can enable Aero despite having a slower computer, but after posting on three Microsoft Vista forums on the issue and getting no response, I assume that TechNet misspoke, but if anyone out their knows how to do this, please leave a comment on the bottom of this article telling me how!

I did however find some registry hacks that were supposed to trick the OS into thinking that I have a fancier computer than I have, but in the end nothing actually worked. However, I did have some of the Aero features work on my computer. Overall I liked what I saw. There are many, many little things here and their, that just make the user experience better. However, as I said before I couldn’t view with the full Aero experience, which is unfortunate because the OS should conform to the users wants, not what it thinks is best.

But maybe there really is a way to enable Aero and, just because it’s so new no one on the forums yet knows how to do this.



Security

Security on Vista is fantastic. This is by far, I think, the strongest improvement of Vista over XP. Vista always prompts when any program is trying to do something that may harm the computer or be something you may not want or know about and they actually manage to do this in a way that isn’t annoying, which is no small feat. They also (finally) make it feasible to run your computer in something other than admin mode and still not get annoyed every two seconds that you can’t do anything (UNIX users of the world unite!). Granted currently Vista probably isn’t the most secure operating system out their due to bugs in code, considering it’s so new. However, I would be willing to bet by Service Pack 1, Vista will be the most secure operating system out their, as Bill Gates likes to tout it. I know many of you Linux and Mac users are probably getting your nerdy and artistic (respectively) panties in a bunch about this claim. However, I am a network administrator and this is actually something I know a bit about. And just to straighten out you Mac users particularly, there ARE viruses out there that affect your computers and new one’s come out every time Jobs decides to say there aren’t. The ONLY reason it appears XP is so much less secure is that it is the dominant operating system and most crackers use either Linux or Apple, so why attack those? However I do agree that some of the Linux distributions and Apple’s current OS is more secure than XP SP2 and is probably currently more secure than Vista, but only because of the fact that it just came out. As I said, come SP1 of Vista Microsoft I think will finally be able to say in truth that they have the most secure OS out their.



Extensibility

Microsoft is also claiming that Vista will be a very extensible operating system, in that they spent a lot of time developing it such that it will be easy for them to release upgrades and updates much more quickly, so we will likely only see about two years in between full new releases of Windows OS’s, and probably one year for a Service Pack update. This is good news indeed for all of us nerds who love new technologies. (this is all according to Bill Gates in a recent interview I heard)



Gadgets

The second best feature of Vista (and I don’t know if this can really be called a big “feature”, but it is one of my favorites) is the Gadgets (again Mac users, you may all collectively roll your eyes at the blatant copying). These are basically DHTML or Ajaxian style controls that live on a side bar. There are currently about 300 of these things out there. They are things like CPU, Memory, and hard drive usage gages, remote desktop control, weather, time, calendar, notes, power consumption, etc. As I say love these, you can make them as transparent as you like, so they don’t really get in the way, but they have cool little features, the coolest of which, I think, are the one’s that take advantage of some new API’s Microsoft has provided for system diagnostics, such as how much voltage the CPU is using and these sorts of things. And of course the fact that these gadgets can be made by anyone very easily, this promises to be a very cool thing as time progresses.



Digital Rights

I know I’ve read all over the place that Windows Vista won’t let you play anything even remotely resembling a media file, even your own stuff, as it tends to think everything is stolen unless you verify you own it five different ways, sacrifice a virgin lamb to Media Player, and give Microsoft your first born son. However my experience has been completely different. I have been able to play all my movies and songs without any trouble. This includes songs that I ripped from all the way back when I was using Windows ME (yes that’s right, someone out their actually used ME, which was perhaps the worst OS ever). I also have had no trouble backing up the DVD’s that I own or playing any of my Divx movies. Really I have detected no difference so far between what I could do on XP and what I can do on Vista.

However that being said, I do think that the digital rights management stuff should NOT be the job of the operating system EVER. As I said before, it should be the operating system’s job to let the user do whatever they want with the hardware they have. It is not the Operating System’s job to restrict the user. However I understand Microsoft and other such companies have to protect themselves from lawsuits, so what are you going to do?



Problems

With Windows Vista apparently there is supposed to be this fancy “Hibernation/Sleep” hybrid feature that allows the computer to reboot in seconds. This however is not the case at all on my machine. First off, I had trouble getting it to let me use this hibernation/sleep mode at all, because in the Disk Cleanup I accidentally checked the “delete hibernation files” checkbox. This effectively disabled hibernation on my computer and it took me forever to figure out how to turn it back on. Basically you have to open a command prompt as an administrator and then tell it to enable hibernation there. The GUI admin panels will not allow you to do this, even though they say they are. It’s a bug that imagine will be fixed in a service pack 1 release.

Then when I finally did get it enabled it takes almost five minutes for my lappytop to resume from hibernation, which is roughly about two minutes slower than just booting it fresh. However I think this might just be a problem with my computer, as it’s always been really slow in this matter and I have friends who say theirs starts very quickly, so I don’t know.

The only real big problem I’ve had with Vista is that about once every couple of days my laptop actually locks up for no apparent reason. It is usually triggered by an audio byte coming on occasionally, so I suspect it is something with my audio driver in my laptop interfacing with Vista. However this is extremely annoying. I can’t remember the last time on XP, OSX, or even FreeBSD, all which I use frequently, that I had the computer actually completely lock up so that there was no way to recover, but to reboot.

This is obviously a major issue. There is nothing more annoying then writing a program and after a half hour or so since your last save/build, having your computer lock up. Again as I say I imagine a service pack 1 release will fix these sorts of bugs.



My Overall Recommendation.

Basically, I have three friends (also tech nerds) who have installed Vista on their machines and none of them have had any of the problems I had. One of them has a Gateway tablet notebook and the other two use uber fast desktops. So perhaps my problems stem from the fact that I’m using a three year old laptop. However, this three year old laptop runs Gentoo, FreeBSD, and XP without any performance problems.

But in the end my recommendation is to wait wait wait for a Service Pack 1 release if you can help it. If you absolutely must have fancy graphics now and must use a Windows operating system for whatever reason, then maybe if you have a fast computer, upgrade now. However if your computer is average too below average don’t even bother, because you won’t get the fancy graphical features anyways and you’ll be left with a system that is less stable and (for now) less secure than XP.


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