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30 Days with Windows Vista Conclusion: Its a Lemon

Thursday, May. 10 2007 | Author: Dave

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HardOCP took thirty days to run through what it’s like to live with Windows Vista on different computers, and even tried out the 64-bit version, and after reading the article, it only confirmed my fears: wait until at least service pack one!

From the article:

The Bottom Line

It’s a lemon.

Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data. The 64-bit version is slightly better (which, frankly, surprised the hell out of us and makes us wonder if Microsoft didn’t make a mistake in choosing to only distribute Home Premium 32-bit in the retail channel), but it still has stability problems.

Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.

So if you are already on Windows Vista, and loving the experience, I’d love to hear from you because even from my own mother, I haven’t heard anything all that great about Vista, not that I have given it much of a chance yet.

Share and Enjoy

“Only” 6 SKU’s for Windows Vista
Windows Vista Warnings and Issues
Vista is following Windows 95’s path
Microsoft to Release 20 Versions of Windows Vista
Windows Vista Without Aero?

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10 Responses for "30 Days with Windows Vista Conclusion: Its a Lemon"

APK

May 10th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
1

Calling it a lemon is a little overstated. If you remember when 95 first came out, it is much the same experience to me…it will take some time for developers to figure it out. I really like:

-the updated UI: the little tweaks and it is seems to leave resources outside of the gpu alone
-the new sound driver model is great
-the sidebar is useful
-the game panel is cool when supported
-ready-boost appears to work great
-hybrid sleep is a neat idea
-mce works well
-it has been perfectly stable for me and very compatible on multiple machines but I am only using 32-bit.

I hate that nvidia still does not have a good video driver, the uec is useless and moving some of the browse dialog layout is just plain poor.
Arcterex

May 10th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
2

For me vista has *just* enough nice things over PITA factor to make me not switch back… however that gap is rapidly getting smaller. I can understand my scanner not working (it’s old, and doesn’t even have XP drivers for it), and while UAC sucks, I can see how it is important, no matter how poorly implemented it is from the user point of view. However things like not getting my microphone to work for my almost new intel MB, random ‘out of memory’ crashes in BF2142, Flight Sim X throwing aero back to basic mode (even older games don’t do that), super slow “calculating time remaining” times for copying / moving / deleting tiny files, 5-10 second waits for UAC to pop up, and other things just add to the frustration.

On the other hand, I really like the new start menu, the eye candy (even though the win-tab fancy alt-tab version is basically useless from a UI perspective), the cleanness of some of the ui elements (explorer’s path bar, the views). I like these *just* enough to not swap back….
Dylan Bennett

May 10th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
3

When the RTM came out, I installed it on my laptop. Long story short, I was reinstalling XP two months later. Now I have a brand new laptop with Vista pre-installed. TOTALLY different experience. No problems at all. Of course, this was the same thing that happened with 95 and 98, so no real big surprises here.
Jambe

May 10th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
4

I’ll echo what everybody else has said. I have Vista on a half-HTPC (it also functions as a private file server to dish media to the players I have around the house) and I’ve an Asus laptop that came with Vista pre-installed. I’ve had no issues with either unit. I wouldn’t say Vista has revolutionized my computing experience or anything like that.

Aero and the GUI improvements don’t really enhance my general experience because I tend to be very direct in how I use a system anyhow, even if that means putting up with a bit of a clunky interface.

My brother in law works at the National Guard armory in Indianapolis as a WAN manager and server technician, and he and his unit are testing Vista (and LH) as a potential upgrade to their current machines. He has told me that the likelihood of the NG adopting Vista at this point is, “high.” Kind of an aside, I know, but I thought you might be interested in hearing that.
Dave

May 10th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
5

This is really great everyone, keep them coming. I could really use some more examples of people “happy” or at least satisfied with Vista. I have totally avoided it, and moved over to Linux… but I’d like to try it out at some point (maybe SP1), but if its ready for prime time now…
Brian Larter

May 10th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
6

I have vista 64 bit installed on my new laptop. I love it, its nice and shiney and hasn’t given me any issues as of yet. There are a few programs that have given me issues when installing but the ability to treat them as though they are installed on xp is great.

The only annoyance I have had so far was when first setting up my laptop for work was dealing with the defender. That MAC PC commercial is done on…

But at the moment very happy with it, just waiting for Canon to support the 64 bit version with their raw drivers.
links for 2007-05-11 « insignificant thoughts

May 11th, 2007 at 3:29 am
7

[...] 30 Days with Windows Vista Conclusion: Its a Lemon The “Obvious” tag doesn’t even begin to describe it. (tags: obvious windows vista lemon) [...]
Bernie Zimmermann

May 12th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
8

I’ve been using Vista for a month or two now, and I haven’t seen a single crash or hang-up. From what I can tell, it’s just as stable as XP. There’s really nothing about the Operating System that makes it a must-have over XP, but there’s also nothing about it (as far as I can tell, anyway) that makes switching back to XP a must-do either.
justme

June 8th, 2007 at 11:00 am
9

you might just take a look at this technet issue:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1358057&SiteID=17

Vista is very, very slow in copy/move/delete operations. And microsoft is very quiet about is ….
PsiFiGi

February 15th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
10

For gaming Vista has been so-so, what truly mystifies me is that with nearly every Microsoft game I own, Vista has been a total failure. FSX Crashes to desktop or fails to load with a Windows giving me a fatal error. Most other Microsoft games act similarly. However COD4, CODWaW, C&C RA3 work just fine. This is on a computer with….

Win Vista Ultimate
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 mhz
8.00 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 512
EVGA NFORCE 680i LT SLI 2 Mainboard.