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Sunday, October 19, 2008

WIndows Vista: Not So Bad

I needed to buy a new PC, and I found a pretty good deal on a Dell Optiplex 330 (dual core, 2GB ram, 160GB HDD). I decided to take a risk and get Windows Vista (Business), even though I read all kinds of horror stories about how unstable, slow, annoying, buggy it is.

Here is my experience so far (after using it for a few hours)

Good:
  • UI is nice. Lots of eye candy, Aero interface is a bit blingy but effective. Decently organized. Lots of options for different views.
  • Boot time is OK for me (my old XP machine took about 45 seconds to boot up, the new one takes about 30)
  • Ubiquitous search boxes are neat.
  • Sidebar is neat.
  • Lots of built in goodies like scan/fax, system backup.

Bad:
  • The User Account Control thing, the box that comes up and asks you "are you sure" for every little thing is annoying. I appreciate the added security, but I am tempted to turn it off.
  • If I ran Windows XP on this machine, I bet it would boot in like 20s.

I also heard that much of my old software would not work in Vista. Not true, so far all this stuff seems to be working fine:

  • WordPerfect Office 12 SP1 (but SP2 won't install!) I may break down and upgrade to the latest WP Office anyway.
  • Microsoft Office XP
  • Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (with patch)
  • FireFox 3.0
  • Mozilla Thunderbird
  • Ad-Aware
  • Antivir Free Antivirus
  • Quicken 2007 (with patch)
  • Roxio Media Creator 10
  • Apple iTunes
Software that won't work:
  • Epson Smart Panel (don't care, Vista has nice built-in scanning functions anyway)
  • WP 12 SP2 won't install.
Considering how blazing fast the new machine is compared to my old Dell 3000 (P4), and that it cost all of about $500, I'm very pleased.

1 comment:

Dustin said...

I've never understood all the Vista hate. On a powerful enough machine, Vista is a great OS with some nice features.

After you're done setting up your machine with all your software and configuring it how you want, you'll find that you encounter the UAC prompts much less often.