I have heard it time and again, from computer users both experienced and new. “Windows Vista is terrible, you should stick with XP.” Is it true? Is Vista really the nightmare that everyone says it is?
I have been using Vista on my laptop for over a year now, and can you guess how many crashes I have experienced with it? One. That’s right, Vista has crashed on me exactly one time. It wasn’t a complete, blue screen of death crash either. The taskbar at the bottom of the screen went kind of funny and I had to reboot because I couldn’t properly click on anything in the taskbar. After a reboot it was fine.
A vast majority of the problems I have heard about with Vista are problems on upgraded versions and not fresh installs. Also, many of the problems are about hardware incompatibility. So here is my advice. Don’t try to use your 10 year old printer with Vista, and don’t try to run Vista on your old PC that has 512 MB and RAM.
On the flip-side of the coin, yes Vista is a resource hog. It will run on 1 GB of RAM but it is slow and really chugs along. I recommend a minimum of 2 GB of RAM whereas Windows XP ran quite comfortably on 128 MB. From what I have seen from the beta of Windows 7, the resource requirements are definitely less.
People complain quite vociferously about having to give permission for Windows Vista to do almost anything such as install a program, run a new program, change settings etc but these warnings lessen over time and what many people do not know is that you can disable many of these warnings. I see these warnings still, but they are few and far between so it really is a bit of an exaggeration.
So, is Vista really the disaster people make it out to be? Not even close. Yes it hogs resources, yes the sidebar is annoying but it can be shut down at any time, and yes it is far from perfect but the Vista complaints, in my opinion, are more about people loving to jump on Microsoft for anything that they do than it is about actual problems with the Operating System.
When Windows 7 comes out, I will likely make the switch, but for now, Vista is just fine by me.