Microsoft Vista is Ready and Able (I can’t believe I’m writing this!)

11.08.2008 NOTE: Since originally writing this article, my feelings about Windows Vista have changed…I now agree that it is sorely lacking in a lot of areas, and I no longer recommend it. After a few months of running it it started to slow down. Bootup times were ridiculous, and it just got slower and slower. Think Windows 98, pre service-packs, only prettier on the outside. I have since looked at a few new operating system choices and have settled on an old favorite (tongue-in-cheeck). See here for the lowdown.

Before I start gushing about Vista, I want to apologize in event for the endless rambling. I just felt the need to post this (and I’ve debated doing so for a few days since I hate to give Microsoft any kudos). But with the glut of FUD and other misinformation/bad advice on the net regarding Vista, I felt obligated to write about my experience with it.

I want to make it clear that I’ve been looking for an alternative to Windows/Microsoft for the past 4 or 5 years now. I’m tired of the Microsoft lock-in, the Internet Explorer debacle (poor CSS support, not standards-compliant or even close, etc etc etc), as well as many other things. About 2 years ago I got so fed up with Win XP that I went and, on a whim, purchased a Mac Mini. As with most Windows users, I had the fear that I wouldn’t be able to function using just a Mac. With the exception of one application (Quicken), every other piece of software was as good or better on the Mac than it was on the PC. I had my share of issues with the Mini/Apple (it didn’t work with my 19″ tube monitor – fuzzy and dark, and many other folks had problems yet Apple insisted there was none, and Apple was in flux at the time with the whole Motorola to Intel switch, etc) but OS X was just a dream compared to Windows XP. After a few months of using the Mac I was set to sell it and buy an iMac. While OS X was awesome, the Mini was an underpowered machine and really just a poor value considering the extra ram and externalized faster/larger hard drive that is needed to make it a decent performing machine.  In anticipation of a new line of Minis/iMacs being introduced at MacWorld, I ebay’d my Mini (amazing why people would pay close to the retail price for used Apple stuff!). Before buying the iMac I decided to give a new flavor of linux a try – Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the first linux distribution that I truly liked. I liked it a lot. And to my surprise, my wanting to dish out $1500 on an iMac (purchase price plus after upgrading it to decent specs) went away! Ubuntu was/is great for tech savvy folks. With the glut of free virtualization solutions out there, even for a guy like me who relies heavily on Adobe products that aren’t supported on linux, with decent hardware one can run the apps in a Win XP-based virtual machine without problem. The days of dual-booting are done unless you’re on old hardware.

So there I was running linux as my sole OS for about a year. It was great. With the exception of a few things here and there. And make no mistake about it – linux is not something I’d recommend for anyone who isn’t interested/able to spend hours upon hours figuring things out just to make them work. I enjoyed it. Then early this year I purchased a new PC, a store-bought HP at an awesome price. Came with WinXP of course. I setup a dual-boot and installed Ubuntu on it. Unfortunately I got constant lockups and after finding out from other owners of this exact model of machine that they were having the same problems, and after upgrading both my video card and power supply and days of troubleshooting, I unhappily returned to Windows XP. A month later I received in the mail a “Vista Express Upgrade” DVD set from HP since I had purchased my PC during the transition phase, and I qualified for an upgrade to Vista Home Premium.

I was excited to install Vista and leave behind XP’s quirks – slowness over time, ugliness, etc. But then a quick google resulting in numerous blog posts/reviews bashing Vista made me put the dvd’s away for months. Then last week I decided to give it a go, after having acquired upgrades for all the apps I use/need (primarily Adobe CS3 and Captivate 3) and ensuring they are Vista ready.

I gotta say – after running Vista for a week – it is excellent. Mac OS X it is not. But it’s much closer. Installation was a breeze. Easiest ever install for an OS (other than OS X of course, though that’s irrelevant since no one ever needs to install/reinstall it since it ‘just works’ out of the box and stays that way!).

Installation took only about 45 minutes, after upgrading my BIOS and following HP’s recommendations prior to doing the actual Windows Vista installation. Mind you, I had about 2 or 3 hours of time spent backing up data to  DVD prior to the install. But the actual Vista install only took 45 minutes, and went without a hitch. I of course used common sense and did a clean install of Vista. Wiped out all partitions, formatted, and clean install.

The added benefit to this for me, as an owner of an HP Media Center PC, is that all of the junk/spyware that HP installs as part of it’s default ‘emergency disk’ set is not prevalent in the HP Express Upgrade for Vista that they sent me. It’s 2 disks – a DVD with a standard Vista Home Premium install, and an HP CD that installs drivers and Roxio CD Creator Basic, plus a few other utilities. But not the Wild Tangent spyware games, etc that my machine was riddled with before.

So, after all the rambling, here are my impressions after running Vista for a week and putting it through it’s paces:

Pluses

For me, Vista is noticeably faster than XP ever was. I have good hardware, but my “Vista User Experience” score is a low 2.8! Yet Vista is still running fast even with all of the eye candy/aero on. Explorer windows open up instantaneously. Most apps start up faster than they did on XP. Office 2007, Adobe CS3, etc all load up much faster on Vista for me.

Aero is gorgeous. Much nicer than anything available on linux that I’ve seen. It *is* as beautiful as OS X from a quality standpoint, though I prefer OS X’s default styling and color scheme. Vista is much more beautiful than XP – it’s not even close. Yet, for me at least, Vista is faster. No downside.

The included apps are big improvements over XP’s included apps. Windows Media Player 11 is great – I prefer it to iTunes. Windows MovieMaker is much improved and is very useable for basic video editing. IE7, though still not as good as Firefox (and I URGE you to move to Firefox 3 Beta 2 asap! It is worth it in terms of speed and no memory leaks finally!). That said, IE7 is slightly faster and loads up much faster too. But until they have a bookmarks toolbar like Firefox I would never switch back.

I’m finding new improvements all the time in Vista. No – Microsoft didn’t steal away the ipod’s UI designers – the UI is still not great since everything is not obvious in terms of function, but I do prefer it to XP. And working with Windows Explorer is instantaneous – much faster than XP. For example, right-clicking on an entry in the Start > All Programs menu doesn’t lock-up the machine for 10 to 20 seconds like it does in XP.

I have not run into a single problem with Vista so far in a week’s worth of heavy usage. During that time I ripped about 150 music CD’s into it using WMP11 (though I made the mistake of not switching the default file format for the ripping to mp3, from WMA, and done tons of other stuff on it. No crashes, no slowdowns, no issues. It just works fine. My RAM usage is a constant between 45% and 60%. My CPU usage varies. The first day or two after the install of Vista, my hard drive was constantly spinning and it was annoying me but then I read that it was just doing some indexing. It stopped as expected and all is fine now.

Windows Media Center is now integrated into the OS for everyone. I had Windows Media Center Edition of XP before. The new enhancements to it in Vista make it much better.

Minuses

Bootup time is slightly slower I think.

The Windows “Mixer”/sound control is totally changed and confusing. I had to route some audio from a cassette (don’t ask) to burn to CD and it took me like 30 minutes and multiple google searches to figure out how to turn on my line-in 2 port to get audio recorded.

Summary

I think Vista is a great improvement over XP and I prefer it as an OS to anything other than OS X. It’s not perfect but it’s so much better than XP I don’t understand why anyone would ‘downgrade’ to XP unless they are running on older hardware or they are just not interested in learning some new UI enhancements, or they are tied to a critical app that isn’t supported on Vista. To me it’s a no-brainer.  I’ve installed a ton of apps, many of which are not supported officially on Vista yet they work fine.

Why Vista runs faster on my machine than XP did…I have no idea. Perhaps it utilizes my dual-core machine more effectively? My hardware specs:

AMD X2 64 4200+
2GB RAM
300GB HD
Nvidia 7300GS video card

Prior to Vista I was seriously thinking I might switch back to Mac and take the plunge on an iMac this summer, but the high-price of any 3rd party hardware, as well as the other issues I have with Apple, and the quality of Vista (for me at least!) has me rethinking that decision. Your mileage may vary of course.