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From the Vault

Vista: A Year Later

October 25th, 2008

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I’ve been running Windows Vista at work for about a year now. I’ve blogged about Windows Vista before, and I’ve been mostly let down by it. But I’m here to confess today that Vista has overtaken XP for me. Yep, it’s true. I kinda dig Vista.

If you perouse the internet, you’ll see – pretty much everywhere – that Vista sucks. You’ll also see a super harsh, super successful Mac compaign aimied squarely at the PC and Vista, and you’ll see Microsoft abandoning the name “Vista” in their marketing initiatives in favor of their new “Windows, not Walls” slogan. Lastly, you’ll see Steve Ballmer telling you that waiting for Windows 7 is okay by him. So Vista, by pretty much all accounts, is a flop.

When I first began using Vista in February of this year, it was killing me. Application after application wouldn’t install. UAC prompts were bombarding me faster than I could “ok” them. The system couldn’t copy across the network faster than I could retype my documents (it seemed, at least). It was absolutely unusable.

Almost a year later, I have to say, I’m really at home in Vista. I’ve only ever seen 1 blue screen event, and, ironically, it was due to Apple’s iTunes 8 Vista USb driver fiasco. Service Pack 1 fixed the network copying issues, pretty much every app has goten situated so that it works in Vista, the icon previews are nice, and there are only a few remaining annoyances; but XP has plenty of those too.

I’m a Mac guy at heart, but truthfully, Vista is the prettiest Microsoft OS ever to come out of Redmond. Whereas with XP I had to disable Luna just to not want to poke my eyes out, Aero is smooth and comforting. The ribbon has grown on me, and the system doesn’t gradually become slower and slower, at least as fast as a naked XP box will.

So there ya go – Vista is a decent product, albeit, after 2 years in the market. I’d still recommend people wait for Windows 7 – no point in training users and getting them comfortable if Windows 7 will be a fraction of what the E7Blog is suggesting. But the Vista/Windows 2008 combo is a good one. I’m not suggesting it beats Leopard, but it’s certainly better than XP/2003.