What are My First Impressions of Windows Vista?
Visited 1454 Times Published by Rico July 28th, 2007 in Computers, Tech and What.
The laptop I’m currently reviewing—a Toshiba Satellite A200—runs on Windows Vista Home Premium. Which is unfortunate, because Vista is like a high-maintenance girlfriend: easy on the eyes, yet a big burden.
There’s no doubt that Vista visually trumps Windows XP. Gone are the garishly kiddy graphics, replaced by a more natural-looking interface that takes a lot of style cues from Web 2.0 Windows XP Media Center Edition.
But Vista is slow. Booting up takes a few minutes. Windows and menus take their time responding to your commands and showing their content. Blaming all that eye candy for this poor performance seems logical, especially when you notice a significant improvement when disabling all of them, and the fact that the A200 is a pretty decent laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo T5300, 512MB RAM, 120GB Hard Disk, 15.4″ 1280×800 Display, Nvidia GeForce Go 7300 128MB, 802.11g WiFi, 3-in-1 Card Reader, yada-yada-yada).
So, aside from
- Better visuals
- A security feature that asks you to confirm any system-changing action
- Better bundled games
- Faster search
- Somewhat better management of multimedia files
…what’s the point of spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade to Windows Vista? Why upgrade to an operating system that demands more from your computer, yet doesn’t add that much to its functionality?
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Vista sucks. I “downgraded” mine to XP because it sucks, and up to now I’m still having problems with installing programs and drivers and stuff. AINT COOL.
Weh, it doesn’t help that Microsoft is requiring all of its OEM partners to preinstall new units with Vista. No wonder Acer openly criticized the OS.
Do stores even sell a laptop na naka-XP? Boo. I’m looking for a new laptop and everything’s in Vista…so when I do buy a new one, I will follow what Riz did and downgrade as well.
Yes, but usually only old models. Just make sure you get the drivers for everything!
“what’s the point of spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade to Windows Vista?”
Is that a trick question?Lol.j/k
Thanks to a little known feature in Windows Vista
that nearly eliminates the dreaded blue screen of death,
migrations will become much easier.
Plus a total redesign of the networking architecture.
For a Developers perspective Vista is the greatest ripppppoofff big time. haha
I totally agree Microsoft flunk this newest O/S release.
too bad.
I’ll admit, Windows Vista has a lot of features I like, such as the vastly improved file explorer navigation. And again, it looks really great. Unfortunately, Microsoft dropped the ball on performance. Even powerful desktops and laptops will have a hard time running this OS.
Doesn’t improvement mean faster, more reliable, and functional software? I mean, Vista is a lot more functional than XP, and definitely more reliabl, but why couldn’t they make it faster?
its all boils into how vista handle memory management,.you need to have some concept of how an OS actually manages memory to know why Vista uses 800 megs on a 2 gig system etc. I am not saying I am an expert, but most OSes scale their caches and such based on available memory. if I’m not mistaken the development period was like 4 yrs. in the making , they struggle a lot. and that is a failure.lol
Chief, 1 GB is the minimum practical for Vista, and they say 2 GB is the practical.
I’ll have to put some blame on Toshiba for scrimping - 1 GB is the standard for new laptops now - like my new cheap Acer 4710z.
undextrois: Yun nga, they really dropped the ball during coding. Or at least overestimated the capabilities of current computers.
Miguel: Yeah, 512MB is a bit weak nowadays. But XP still runs decently on half-a-gig. My old desktop was like that, and I was able to tweak it for max speed! Not so with Vista. Grrr.
Our Acer Aspire 4710 runs on Intel Core 2 Duo with 1gb Mem and yet Vista is still slow
Grrr!
Guys, have you noticed that if you ask a PC vendor for an XPpro installed laptop, its cost more than the similar model equipped with the vista premium?
However if you buy the Vista software , it cost more than 20 grand for the upper end vista but only within 10 k for the XP pro?
Check out this post on Vista sales moving in reverse. Even the vendors are saying no to Vista!
I use an ECS Duo Core with Vista. I have to say it isnt as slow as you’ve described it here (with 1gb mem and duo core) but it crashes a lot. and yes, most programs are not yet Vista capable. Ugh.. problem is I bought the original!