With the recent release of Vista sp1, I thought I’d take a moment and talk briefly about my Vista experience thus far.
Reviews of Vista around the tech world have been lacklustre at best and my experience hasn’t been any different. After 4 months of use my overall opinion of Vista is a resounding… meh.
That’s not to say its all bad by any means. It does have some admirable qualities. The look and feel of the GUI is the most noticeable. I have to admit that I really don’t like looking at my XP desktop at work anymore. In terms of function, the new organization of the file system is a good move. I like the desktop-centric organization and the user based setup. The *nix file systems have been doing this for years, this is not any kind of innovation, but I think it’s a much more user friendly layout.
The the biggest downside to Vista is performance… or the lack there of. It’s a very cumbersome, bloated system with a huge footprint. This makes for a very slow experience. I think this is the real downfall of the system. Sure the warnings and cautions are annoying, but those can be disabled (and were disabled about 5 minutes after installation).
My overall user experience hasn’t been anything special. I’ve had a few glitches here and there and some random issues with some of the updates, but nothing different from the previous Microsoft releases. It’s stable, functional and much better to look at than XP. Service Pack 1 hasn’t offered any noticeable difference in performance either.
All in all, it’s not a bad operating system; it just isn’t anything special. There are really no compelling reasons to make the switch in the o/s itself and the market reaction has reflected that. I’ll continue using Vista on this laptop that it came with, but I won’t be going out of my way to install it on any of my other computers anytime soon.
