On Monday, a Windows Vista user described his difficulties with the new OS. On Tuesday, another user chimed in with quite a different response based on a 9 month experience.
Described as "Facing the full horror of a horrible Windows Vista Review," Alex Zaharov-Reutt added his thoughts in response to the original story at ITWire on Monday.
The story goes all the way back, 9 months, to Vista RC1. The author elected to mimic the style of the original post, in order to contrast his findings with those of Angus Kidman previously posted.
Mr. Zaharov-Reutt was generally pleased, but he did complain about drivers. In fact, his early experience with missing drivers led him to write an open letter to Bill Gates. However, those early problems have been generally, but not completely, resolved. [But not enough for Apple to miss a chance to point out the problem in their TV ads.]
On the Fujitsu Core 2 Duo Tablet, 2 GM RAM, there were few problems with speed. Neither did he have any networking problems. Except that a network storage device easily "seen" by XP was not accessible by Vista.
In terms of MS Internet Explorer, the verdict was the same. He switched to Firefox. "Sadly it doesnit irestore the sessioni as Firefox does," Mr. Zaharov-Reutt wrote, "so weive more or less ditched IE7 for most things, and like Kidman, have found that Firefox is a much better browser."
All in all, the article pointed out a surprising number of problems, but the tone was of general contentment with Vista, perhaps based on a much longer period of time to work things out. That led to the conclusion, "But to say dismiss Vista as a steaming pile oi operating system mess is just plain wrong. We use it every day, and love it."
Perhaps the real lesson here is that all new operating systems take a long time to get accustomed to. Some are just friendlier for the newbie who wants to get to work right away instead of tinker, change Browsers, and search for drivers.