Lifehacker posed a question to its readers: “What Makes Vista Worth It?”
I was surprised by the number of positive responses since all you ever hear about in the “tech community” is how bad Vista is. The problem is, so much of what you read and hear on the various tech blogs and podcasts is simply regurgitated from somewhere else. That’s why you see the same gadget talked about on 20 different blogs with almost no original content. (That’s also why I didn’t want to create yet another tech blog–what’s the point?)
Anyway, I’ve been using Vista on my home computer since it came out last year, so I thought I would use this opportunity to put my 2 cents in on the discussion.
The bottom line is that I really like it, but I think part of that comes from my history with XP. I used to work at Microsoft prior to the launch of XP, so I spent a lot of time running the various Whistler betas and taking and delivering various training on XP. Since leaving Microsoft, I’ve been a network admin at a couple of different companies, and so I’ve deployed or redeployed at least a couple of thousand machines over the last several years. I’ve stared at the XP splash screen, the blue-and-green “Fisher Price” color scheme, and the “Take a tour of XP” popup balloon waaayy too many times. Honestly, I’m done with XP.
So I was really ready to move on to Vista when it came out. I upgraded a few of the components on my old Dell desktop at home, installed Vista Business on it, and have never looked back. (Well, I still have to stare at XP at work, but at least not on my home computer.)
Now, a little more than a year later, here’s my non-exhaustive list of Vista’s features: the good, the bad, and the meh (in no particular order).
The Good:
- Aero, Aero, Aero – The interface is much cleaner, and I like the transparency. It feels a lot more polished and grown up than XP’s Luna GUI.
- Better use of graphics cards’ processors – Part of the reason the Aero Glass interface looks so good is that the OS offloads more of the graphics processing to the video card’s GPU. That frees up more of the system’s CPU for other tasks.
- Sound mixer – You can adjust the volume for applications independently. For example, turn the Windows Sounds down while keeping Winamp louder. This is one of those simple things that you don’t really appreciate until you go back to an XP machine.
- ReadyBoost – Stick a fast USB flash drive in the computer and use it to pre-cache commonly used applications so that they load faster. While some people have said it doesn’t make a noticeable performance difference, it did on my older machine.
- Better firewall and better integration of Defender - Yeah, XP SP2 has a built-in firewall, and you can download Defender separately, but they work better on Vista. The Vista firewall is also much more robust and can block outbound traffic as well.
- Expanded Task Manager and performance monitoring – Monitor processes, services, and performance as in XP, but then launch the Resource Monitor for lots more performance information.
- Background defragmentation – Not a huge need in this age of ginormous hard drives, but it can help maintain the performance levels of your system. Being able to schedule it to run automatically is a nice change.
- Explorer – “Favorite Links” panel, more viewing options, and a preview pane make it easy to customize the view to your liking. I don’t like how the File menu is hidden by default, but it’s fairly easy to turn on and keep on permanently.
- The games – OK, so I’m easy to please. But as a sidenote, you can use parental control settings to limit which games your kids can play in Vista.
The Bad:
- User Access Control (UAC) – It’s annoying and unnecessary. It’s the first thing that got disabled. I log in under a local administrator account. I know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t have to ask for the computer’s permission first.
- The Search and Indexing services – One of the common praises on Lifehacker is for the enhanced search capabilities in Vista. I rarely search for files on my computer, so these services just bogged down my computer.
- Other unnecessary services – Much like XP, too many things are enabled out of the box in Vista. Turn off what you don’t need, and the system will always run a lot better.
- Backup – Unlike in XP, you can’t pick and choose which files to back up. It’s either everything or it’s only certain types of files such as all your documents. And then the backups aren’t to a single .BKF file but to tons of smaller files. No, thanks. I use Nero BackItUp, and it works great for what I need.
- Media Player 11 – Specifically the DRM restrictions that make Vista’s WMP almost completely worthless. Why should my CPU run at 100% utilization just to play an MP3? I’m sticking with Winamp 5.5.
- Task Scheduler – How do you ruin something so simple and intuitive as the Task Scheduler? Make it as robust as it is in Vista. Holy cow! You could get lost in that thing. I think I scheduled some tasks to run but I’ll never know for sure.
- Automatically enabling IPv6 – Very few people need to use IPv6, so why enable it by default? Turn it off to increase network performance.
- Longer boot times – Sorta. The actual time from turning on the computer to the point at which I’m at my desktop is about the same as XP. But it takes so much longer for all the services to start up. If you don’t have to reboot often, it’s not a big deal. But I really dread the times that I do.
The Meh:
- IE 7 – Whatever. I use Firefox.
- Windows Photo Gallery – All I want to do is view pictures. It does that fine. I don’t use any of the other features.
- Windows Sidebar – I don’t understand the appeal of gadgets or widgets or whatever on your desktop.
- Flip 3D – What is the point of that again? Alt+Tab is faster.
