The Full Horror of Vista

May 13th, 2007 at 3:00 PM - News by John Martellaro

A company that took its time, did everything right, and migrated to Vista recounted the full horror of the experience. According to their account, company employees found Vista to be slow, Explorer to be problematic, and other quirks that left them less than satisfied.

The Transit company took the optimal path. They waited for the typical new release bugs to be worked out. They purchased a new PC from a major vendor, Lenovo, that had Vista pre-installed in order to avoid upgrade nightmares. Finally, they kept the installed software on the computer at a minimum to avoid complications.

The verdict? "...weive found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish weid never moved," Angus Kidman said in a Blog report carried by ITWire.

The first observation was that Vista was "hideously slow" even on a new Vista certified PC with twice the RAM and a faster processor. Boot times were longer than the predecesor. The connection to the Linksys router failed, and heroic support from Microsoft failed to resolve the problem. "...if you canit get basic IP working in 2007, something pretty fundamental is going wrong," Mr. Kidman wrote.

Another irritating problem related to using a local file as an HTML home page. Mr. Kidman reported that this was hopeless effort with Vista, "...since Internet Explorer insists on launching any page in a new window because of a security restriction. As such, Vista has managed to convince us to ditch Internet Explorer after nine years and switch to Firefox, which doesnit indulge in such ridiculous behaviour, and seems to run faster as well."

Finally, out of curiosity, Microsoftis Vista Upgrade Advisor was run. It reported that the computer didnit have enough drive space, even though Vista was preinstalled. And then it reported that the display and sound card "werenit certified for Vista. The third thing it told us was that none of the Lenovo utilities on the machine were Vista-ready. So much for certification."

The bottom line was Microsoft should have worked harder to make Vista, "a dog," a bigger advance over Windows XP/SP2.