Ok I’ll be the first to say that Microsoft is greedy, I mean all one has to do is look at the way they try to rake in money with the Xbox to see that. That being said and having read article after article on people debating the good the bad and the ugly of Windows vista I must say I have a few opinions myself on it.

As You can see they aren’t bad systems

Common Discussions & Improvements

One of the most commonly discussed vista facts is the new User Account Control system (aka UAC). Some like it Most find it annoying We both found it annoying so I quickly did a google search and learned how to disable it. The UAC is a dialouge that pops up in vista aking for your permission to do pretty much anything even if your account in an administrator account. However as I said you can disable that annoying little pop up, by simply going into the control panel and turning the option off in User accounts.

Another “commonly” discussed fact is the system requirements of windows vista. Something That I really haven’t noticed a difference of on my 2 year old computer (which is practically ancient in computer years). I would go so far as to say my computer seems faster epsecially since I’m using the 64 bit edition as opposed to the 32 bit.

The graphics on vista are quite a treat if your into eye candy (and yes I am). Not to mention the way they use the Icons to actually tell you about a file. For instance now when I open my computer and see my hard drives I’m actually given the amount of space available graphically. There is now also a handy slider to allow me to make my icons detailed or if I want extremly large. The extremely large feature is quite nice if you have a lot of pictures to go through or wallpapers. Because now you don’t have to separately preview every one you want to look at or try to guess what it is from some tiny little thumbnail.

Another handy feature is the Favorites sidebar You can easily drag and drop folders you frequently use onto this bar and it creates nice little shortcuts to them for you. If your like me and spend alot of time working with folders this nice little feature is something I wont be giving up any time soon. One click folder links are indeed a god-send.

Another thing about vista that I like is how updates can be handled. Now I can run the windows updater program and then instead of being annoyed every 5 minutes once the updates are installed I can opt to wait up to 4 hours before being reminded that I need to reboot to finish the update.

Built in Speech recognition is another neat addition to vista, after just a few mouse clicks I found myself ordering my computer around with a microphone. Something I never thought I would be able to do. I actually wrote a whole forum post by talking to my computer. (A somewhat strange albeit kewl feeling).

Biggest Complaints

Actually I would have to say that my biggest complaint about vista is not actually a vista problem at but a 3rd party problem. It’s the lack of support for 64 bit systems in software. The fact that Mark and I love to be able to customize our interfaces has never really been a problem since we discovered Object Desktop. However now That I’m using a 64 bit system there are some components of object desktop which don’t work with it, such as Icon Packager a program to change all the icons on your system, while it works perfectly fine on Marks 32 bit system. My Most importent software the ones which really concerned me however, were my web server, mysql database server, ftp server and mail server, All which run without a hitch.

In this household we play alot of computer games, one of the major games is Battlefield 2. Right after upgrading I launched my game and began to logon to a server to play only find that I was getting kicked for having insuffecient OS privleges. This however was easily remedied by updating the games punkbuster version, one simple small download. The rest of my games however (Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, Zoo Tycoon 2 SIMS 2, Age of mythology..etc…etc..etc..) all work fine I’v had no crashes of any kind. The black and blue screens of death have officially become obsolete. I can also run my classic games without a problem, such as an old typing tutor that was designed for windows 95.

The only other problem that occurred and I really wouldn’t call this a problem was that I had to download updated audio and video drivers for my computer. But they were easy enough to find and install.

Final Words

Windows Vista is different, it’s not XP nor is it meant to be. As with any new operating system there are bound to be bugs and things which need to be changed or even re-evaluated during the initial release period. Most of the people complaining about Vista were probably complaining about XP when it was first released as well. Change can be scary especially in a tech environment. But I think that once the first service pack comes out and more people delve into actually giving it a fair chance it will come to be appreciated in the same manner which XP has. After using Vista for the past 3 months I really don’t think there is anyway in which I could return to XP and still have the same feelings about it. Things that were a pain in XP have become easier to do in Vista Such as resizing a partition (something you need 3rd party software for in XP) or Assigning a drive letter to a network folder which takes two clicks on a one dialog box. If you give it half a chance you might find you actually like Vista. So before you began casting judgments based on other peoples opinions just remember what they say about opinions, they are like assholes everybody has one