‘The Wow starts Now’, was the catch-cry at Vista’s lavish launch early in 2007. The campaign was slick and glossy, but it didn’t take long for users to complain in droves that Vista was as slow as a wet week, a resource hog and painful to work with. The cool aero-glass look wasn’t enough to offset the pain. The verdict: Vista was a cane toad in fancy drag.
Microsoft’s infrequent responses reflected, with crystal clarity, the company’s arrogance. ‘Frankly, the world wasn’t 100 percent ready for Windows Vista,’ was how one spokesperson put it. Mostly, Microsoft ignored the howls of protest because it knew that Vista would sell up a storm regardless, because it gets installed on almost every new PC sold.
By mid-year, the rousing chorus chanting that the Wow had become a mere whisper stung Microsoft into action. A new campaign was launched: ‘100 Reasons You’ll be Speechless.’ The marketing hype took enormous liberties with the truth and failed to mention the heavy slug of the Vista upgrade price or the cost of the extra hardware needed to run it.
By the end of 2007, most of the early wrinkles – including missing drivers – had been ironed out via various updates, but Vista’s poor performance remained. Those who hope for Service Pack 1 to improve things will be out of luck, as the tests at this site show. Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, on the other hand, showed a 10% improvement.
Reality bites
Vista’s advantages over XP are largely cosmetic, despite what Microsoft says, while some of its drawbacks are very real. For a light-hearted take on this comparison, check this story which uses reality inversion to great effect by introducing XP as the successor to Vista and going on and on about the many improvements XP introduces.
Bottom Line: If you have a well-working XP set-up on your PC, keep it. There’s little you can achieve with Vista that you can’t do faster with XP. If you run professional graphics applications, the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista is an extra handicap. The same applies to CPU-intensive applications like video transcoding, where Vista lags a long way behind XP.
The old XP theme doesn’t look too bad if you change the blue borders for silver ones (Control Panel>Display>Themes) and replace the green lawn with a pretty picture (right-click on picture>set as desktop background). If you’re still hankering after Vista’s eye-candy, there’s plenty of it and it’s mostly free.
Vista Style is a popular choice. Vista transformation pack is another. Be warned that some of these transformations can have unintended effects on system stability.
If you still have your heart set on Vista, the best way to avoid the steep upgrade price is to buy it with a new PC. My Vista Business edition came with a bargain Compaq Presario laptop I bought on sale (twin AMD Turion cpus, 1gb of RAM, nVidia go 6100 graphics).
This is one of the first of the ‘100 Reasons you’ll be speechless’. It did that alright because, fresh out of the box, Vista Business took many minutes to reveal its full glory, the long periods of darkness relieved occasionally by the mouse pointer appearing with the circle spinning like a top.
About performance, the 100 reasons list says this: ‘New technology in Windows Vista makes your PC significantly more responsive while you are performing everyday tasks. Improved start-up and sleep behavior helps both desktop and mobile PCs get up and running more quickly …’
Don’t believe a word of it – Vista runs many more services than XP and uses far more resources as it looks after itself. That’s no surprise, since new Windows releases have always been heftier than previous versions, and Microsoft’s architects have always relied on Intel to restore performance. Put another way, ‘whatever Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.’
