I purchased an HP notebook ($1,000) back in November with a dual-core AMD Turion X2 and upgraded it to 2 GB of memory and a 7,200 rpm hard drive. I did this because I noticed at first just how slow Vista was. Now, this was my first computer with Vista, and it came preloaded with Vista Home Premium, but I was incredibly disappointed how much time it took to work through things (loading, opening programs, moving files, etc.)
Even after upgrading the hardware, Vista still ran slow. I upgraded to Ultimate just after the beginning of the year to see some extra features (Hey, if I'm gonna go to a new OS, I wanna see what's really new and the best that they can offer.) Again, disappointed with their performance.
One thing I noticed about Vista is that it tends to slow down on your system much faster than XP. A system running Windows XP will eventually slow down slightly in certain tasks from lots of old registry values, cleaning, etc. Vista slowed down DRAMATICALLY within a few months of its installation.
A lot of the built in security access "Confirm/Deny" constant popups causes me the biggest grief. Because you have to click confirm on five different Windows popup warnings just to delete a folder, it ends up taking you five times the amount of time to perform the simplest tasks as in XP. It's also gotten to the point where it takes several seconds of Vista just hanging there thinking before it will pop up each of these Windows messages, causing even more sluggish performance.
The real difference I saw between XP and Vista were all visual changes. It did not offer many new, better, or improved features over XP other than asthetic changes. However, if there aren't as many improvements and the OS isn't offering so much more power than XP, why is it requiring to use huge quantities of system resources compared to XP? Simply put, Vista disappointed me in this aspect as well, as it was like having a very unstable installation of all Norton products on the computer again, attaching to everything and making everything seem to run slower.
I've been very close to reverting my HP laptop to XP, the big kicker that keeps me from doing it is the lack of drivers for these notebooks for XP since they were built for Vista.
I truly believe that MS needs to do a lot more planning and really offer some improvements over the OS and not in asthetics. 90% of the customer base out there would purchase the product for its stability over its asthetics. In the next few years I'm hoping that 64-bit computing will really begin to take hold, and more software programmers begin making the change over to this standard. A more solid 64-bit OS is in the future and desperately by MS. When you think about it, a modern desktop requires 2 GB of memory just to run Vista smoothly, and that's your standard memory included in your basic systems today. However, because of limitations of 32-bit computing you can only have up to 4GB. That limitation is removed with 64-bit computing.
But lets face the real music. MS just as all of us know that we will all have to eventually turn to Vista because of support, drivers, compatibility, etc. MS knows this and that is why they can just ignore the millions out there voicing how much they dislike Vista and want to stay with XP. But, at least it seems to me and I know to several others, it seems almost cruel that you must completely change your entire system for an almost inferior OS. Will Vista be better in the next few years? Of course, the same happened with XP. But right now, for a lot of people, a lot of programs, and a lot of businesses Vista is just not ready.
