Gordon said:
Please elaborate? I run Vista Home Premium and Office 2007, and find no
"drawbacks" at all. It performs at least as fast as XP if not faster. I
have NO BSOD's, and no other problems.
Possibly the worst aspect is that things in "Familiar" menus were moved
around just for the sake of it. This left many confused and forced a
learning curve that was unnecessary - the items function the same but
are hard to find.
I have installed Vista, XP and Several Linux on the same machines, Vista
is SLOWER on all of them than XP with fresh installs. If you find it
faster then the likely explanation is that you are comparing with an
older install of XP that has a lot of things running. For common tasks,
and this is not easy to compare realistically, the order of speed is
Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux, XP and Vista. This is not just identical
hardware but THE SAME hardware, about 10 machines.
There has been a speed improvement in Vista, possibly because Graphics
drivers have been improved, however I have nothing here that it actually
beats XP on. This includes one machine from 2000 and the rest < 2 years old.
Things that should have been improved upon were not, Explorer is still
buggy, the Mail client was messed about with and switched around so as
to make it a waste of time even setting up mail, and the search function
was a joke.
File sharing functionality and networking are very hard to get working
reliably, Vista to Vista is okay but mixed with anything else it is less
reliable than W98 was and that was a bit flakey to say the least.
Now, these criticisms are not insurmountable, but I think most were
expecting better from Microsoft than a "Beta" version, which is what the
Released version felt like.
Of course when you are the best act in town people expect more from you
than from others, and new hardware is going to be necessary for the
future, but I think MS went for "Looks" rather than solid functionality
and lost the plot a bit on the way.
I like the Media Center, I find that works well and is reliable, however
my old W3.1 media player played movies, 95 and 98 and 2000 played
movies, XP played movies and Vista plays movies. I can't watch them on
another machine because the networking doesn't work properly, but under
all those systems the damned movie looks and sounds the same. Did I
really need all those versions of Media player to achieve the same
result when networking could have been the focus of attention?
So no Vista is NOT bad, but it is not quite as expected and if anything
it is somewhat less useful than XP.