The Final Verdict on Windows Vista
September 07, 2007
I've been using Windows Vista for almost five months now and I'm ready to get it said. I like Vista. No, I love Vista. Now, this is a very rare occurrence for me to love a Microsoft Operating System so early in the game - but it has happened.
Many have argued that Vista lacks "anything new" and it "fiddles with an interface that already works" , and to them I say hogwash! Many have complained and pointed out that Vista is just pretty icing atop an already well baked cake - and they're right. We can debate the quality of baking here, but it is primarily delicious icing atop an already baked cake of usefulness.
Many will argue with you about how the aesthetics don't matter, but I believe that it really does matter. For me, what makes Vista so great isn't one or two big new things that add up to create a much better feeling experience. All of the icing, as it were, ends up making everything a little easier to use and in the end makes the whole system better.
Many directly complain about Aero just being there to "look pretty". My rebuttal is simply, "what's wrong with that?". If my interface simply looks better and I feel like it suits my tastes better, won't it make me happier in doing whatever I'm doing? Aero's new rendering engine makes everything render much more smoothly and appear much more attractively. This isn't even to begin touching on Vista's amazing new font-rendering engine which makes looking at XP's ClearType (which is worlds better than Windows 98's Font Smoothing which is...) painful.
Little features, too, help to make the difference. The customizable side-bar in Explorer is a change made that utterly revolutionizes the way I use Explorer and mscom save dialogs. I no longer need to hunt for any of my common folders, I just click and there I am. I am constantly reaching for it whenever I use an XP box. Even the progress bar representing hard disk usage has a noticeable impact on my daily use habits, since I no longer need to do the old "Right Click - Properties" shuffle.
Also, while it is available for XP, Windows Media Player 11 fits right in with Vista. I have to thank Andy for turning me on to this one, but it ends up being the best media player that I've ever worked with. The views are wonderfully thought-out with genre breakouts, album breakouts and artist breakouts. If you pull up a search that returns multiple albums, they are each seperated - so you never have the googlie eyed stare at 1,000 music results that you get with iTunes.
What's not to like? Gaming Performance. I've still got my XP partition around for gaming, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. I can observe noticeable differences in frame rates in Warhammer 40k, Battlefield 2 and just about everything else that I've tried under Vista Vs. XP. It seems like there's a lot going on under the hood, that we don't really have control over.
So, where do I stand now? I love Vista. It's not there for gaming, but as a day-to-day workstation - it makes a wonderful OS choice.
Note: I'm not even considering licensing issues. The OS market is so woefully messed up that there's no point in even discussing them.
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2 Comments
| Tagged: Microsoft, Vista, Computing
Andy 2007/09/10
I agree. With all of it.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/09/11
Yae! Agreement. What else do you like about Vista?