Reluctant Upgrade to Vista
Posted on March 2, 2007
Filed Under Technology |
I certainly know better but ended up doing it anyway. Never, never, never implement new technology early – especially software. Anyone who’s done so certainly knows why. It’s rarely if ever, ready for prime time, and usually takes six months to a year to work out all the bugs.
My only excuse is that it wasn’t entirely by choice that I went from Windows XP to Vista a short while back. Actually I did it within just a couple weeks of Microsoft making their new Vista operating system available – the non-business premium version that is.
The reason for doing so was simple – my laptop died. When I went to order a replacement from Dell, they were shipping Vista instead of XP. I probably could’ve found a way to special order it with XP, but was already annoyed at Dell trying to sell me everything but the kitchen sink throughout their order process, so in haste to get through it, I didn’t drill down deep enough to find that option.
The only good thing is that I didn’t really upgrade, but got an entirely new computer. Having later read some of the accounts by those suffering through upgrade attempts, I realized I fared much better. There were not the usual compatibility problems, at least with the hardware and software already installed.
Of course it was a somewhat different story when trying to load software I already had. At first I was concerned about the post-install messages that popped up saying “the program may not have installed correctly”. But noticing after awhile that Vista seemed to throw that message for most everything, I got comfortable with ignoring it.
In general, Vista looks and feels pretty good – but maybe that’s just because it’s something new after being so used to XP. They’ve added some useful items but also a whole lot of overhead. The gadget sidebar is interesting, but breaks on loading about 1 out of every 3 starts. You don’t even want to think about running Vista without plenty of memory and the fastest CPU you can get, because it’s a hog.
Vista takes about 5 gig of space unopened and when loaded, you’ll find that after doubling the size of your hard drive, you still have only about as much free space as on the smaller drive you left behind.
There’s so much GUI, it takes some time to get underneath to see what’s running, and then more time to figure out how to disable all the stuff you don’t need or want. I guess I’m old school, but firmly believe in the K.I.S.S principle of keeping it simple. This new machine would actually run like greased lightning if I could disable all the fluffy extras.
At the end of the day, the new laptop works fine and I’m adjusting to Vista, but my advice is unless you have some pressing reason to buy now, then you’ll be better off waiting awhile before jumping on board. That was immediately apparent when the first thing Vista did upon finding a live internet connection was to download about a dozen patches for itself.
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