Why I Dislike Windows Vista
Regular readers of my blog might notice that I take a fair amount of shots at Microsoft Windows Vista. Clearly I’m no fan of it, but I guess it would help to explain why I feel this way. So, let me list the reasons why I dislike Vista:
- Cancel or allow hell: I generally don’t turn security features off, but to actually use my Vista computer I had to shut off User Account Control because of all of the cancel or allow prompts. Security should not get in the way of the user experience. With Vista, security is always in the way.
- Vista requires 2GB of RAM as a minimum for even a home system so that you can get decent performance. At least with XP you could get decent performance out of 512MB to a 1GB. At least RAM is cheap these days.
- Want to upgrade to Vista on your current hardware? Forget it. You’re better off buying a new system as your current hardware likely won’t be able to handle Vista.
- The driver support has been sketchy at best. That’s been underscored by the fact that poorly written drivers are the main cause of Vista instability (just ask nVidia video card owners).
- Battery life on portable computers nosedives if you have Vista thanks to all of the Aero eye candy.
- The many different versions of Vista confuse the hell out of basic computer users as they have no clue what exactly they need. Do they need basic or premium? What about ultimate? I guess Microsoft is counting on Joe Enduser to take the easy way out and buy the most expensive one.
I’m sure I can come up with more, but these are the ones that I deal with in some way, shape, or form on a frequent basis. Perhaps the OS will grow on me as it matures. But by then Windows 7 might be out, and I might be using that instead.
June 24, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I agree fully. I recently purchased a Gateway M-6824 from Office Depot, and it came with Windows Vista Home Premium. My biggest complaint is the lack of driver functionality and Windows Media Center. Media Center has caused me so many problems – it got to a point that whenever I brought my laptop out of sleep mode or connected a second monitor Media Center would pop-up over 20 times!!! I finally ran ALOT of disk defragmenters, system optimizers, registry cleaners, and so on, and finally one of them fixed Media Center… but for how long?
Anyway, cool blog, keep up the good work – for me it’s like reading the newspaper each morning.
June 24, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I agree as well…and I have a few of my own issues/complaints to add to the list. I’ve really tried to like Vista and I even have a brief list of things that I do like about it – features that aren’t in any previous versions of Windows that I think make doings things easier but when it comes down to it I need my system to perform and Vista just doesn’t do it.
I bought a Dell XPS M1530 with 4GB of RAM and the Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4 GHz) processor and a 256 MB dedicated Nvidia 8600M GT (which also gets to share some of that 4 GB for additional space). Compared to the computer I had at the time, A 2.8 GHz P4, it should have totally crushed. I was dismayed to see that my brand new laptop only performed slightly faster than my old system. While service pack 1 fixed some things, I still have the following complaints:
1. i use professional design software (AutoCAD, Adobe products and others) and they are particularly buggy. AutoCAD could barely run on Vista without service pack 1.
2. why does Aero interfere with applications? it seems like the window decorator should be independent from the functionality of the applications on a system. some programs need Aero turned off in order to function properly which makes no sense to me at all. the window manager shouldn’t even come into play in that area.
3. why do i have occasional networking issues when using Vista to connect to networked pc’s running XP or 2000? sometimes one of the computers on my office network will refuse me access no matter what i do. i’m the one who set the network up so i know all the passwords…still no luck.
4. on occasion my wireless connection at home goes out for no reason and i have delete the remembered connection and then re-connect and re-type in my password. why?? XP never does this to me. the same thing happens to my wife’s laptop (also with Vista).
5. local disc read/write speed is slow. i bought a 7200 RPM HD for speed but Vista uses it as slow as an XP machine uses a 5400 RPM HD.
6. network read/write speed is slow. i can transfer files faster on my older computers over the same network. before service pack 1 i didn’t even try to transfer files over the network. i’d just copy things back and forth with a usb drive to save myself the pain.
7. network connections dialog box seems overly complicated and kinda useless at the same time. on both my computer and my wife’s there are options in there that when selected don’t take or stay selected.
8. memory consumption is amazingly massive. although i haven’t had any trouble as a result of that because i have 4 GB on my system it still pisses me off. my system, after some use and closing out of all of those applications, will be idle at 1.2 GB of memory being consumed.
9. when you open task manager to see your active processes, the amounts of memory listed there don’t add up to the total reported as in use on the performance tab (yes I added them up) so the processes are actually using almost 2x as much as they state in task manager.
i have since installed XP on this computer and let me tell you…everything is blazing fast compared to how it performed with Vista. big improvement. i can live without the handful of functional things that i liked in Vista.
June 24, 2008 at 10:30 pm
You know, reading that makes me wonder if I would be better off re-installing Windows XP as well. I think I might just give it a try.