Two weeks ago, I decided to be adventurous. No, I didn't take skydiving lessons or go white-water rafting; rather, I installed Windows Vista on my home computer.
I had heard a great deal about Microsoft's new operating system. The main idea that I heard coming from other reviewers was that it looked cool, but had its drawbacks. For the past two weeks, I've been trying to see if that's the truth.
First, Vista does look a lot nicer than Windows XP. The Aero graphical theme makes everything look more modern. I will admit that at times, it seemed like there were too many special effects on the screen at once, which resulted in distraction and extreme memory usage. Speaking of extreme memory usage, if you're going to install Windows Vista, make sure you have more than 1 GB of system memory. Even my computer, with 1 GB, could have used some more juice at times.
So the verdict on the graphics in Vista: nice, but memory hungry. No surprises here.
Functionally, Windows Vista is significantly different from Windows XP and its predecessors. However, I often wonder if the folks at Microsoft changed things around for simplicity, or just to make Vista look different or dummy-proof. As an example, the disk defragmenter in Windows Vista, a utility that optimizes hard drive performance, has two options. The first defrags every hard drive in your system, and the second allows you to defrag all your hard drives on a schedule. There's no option for choosing just a particular hard drive and there is no progress bar during the defrag process - two features that existed in Windows XP. According to people on some online message boards that I read, Microsoft took away the features that I found useful in the defrag utility in order to dummy-proof the operating system. I understand that many people using PCs today do not understand what the disk defragmenter does, but there are many who do, and those people like to have options. What kept Microsoft from keeping those options in an advanced settings area? I'd love to know.
There are a few new features in Vista that I like, but I quickly realized that all of those features were "borrowed" from the Macintosh operating system. For example, user files are now kept in a user folder rather than the My Documents folder, similar to the home folder in Mac OS X. Also, on the left side of windows, there is now a configurable list of often-visited places, just like there is in Mac OS X.
I could go on with my analysis of all of Vista's new features. What it comes down to is that most of the useful new features were taken from Mac OS X, and anything else just seems stupid and useless. Speaking of stupid, I still don't understand how Microsoft expects people to pay over $100 to upgrade to an operating system that really isn't that superior to Windows XP. On top of that, most people have no reason to upgrade any time soon, since Microsoft will continue to support XP until 2014.
What I would recommend for users: If you buy a new PC with Windows Vista, you might as well stick with it. It's certainly not inferior to XP; it's just not superior in any ways that will benefit most users. If you have a computer with Windows XP, stick with it … unless you're adventurous.
original link: http://media.www.thetriangle.org/media/storage/paper689/news/2007/03/16/ArtsEntertainment/Vista.Proves.To.Be.No.Better.Than.Xp-2778493.shtml
You just put in all the positives, ill help you out with the negatives.
