5 Responses to “ Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 ”

1. Gina M. Spivey (1 comments) on November 23rd, 2009 3:21 pm

   I would like my item return back to me or i am write the state attroney office in the state of illinois
   Rating: 1 / 5

2. Film Flim Fan (1 comments) on November 23rd, 2009 4:39 pm

   Microsoft forces it down people’s throats by trying to stop XP support & coercing comp manufacturers into exclusively offering Vista, but now they’re trying to change their tone. Don’t buy Mojave ads and don’t buy Vista.

   Vista is obsessed with looks. Unfortunately the resource-hog features like Aero (semi-transparent borders? really?) don’t help productivity. And after the first 5 seconds of use, you really don’t notice the fluff anymore.

   What you do notice beyond the first 5 seconds is the sluggishness, even with the fluff turned off. Opening the control panel takes 15 seconds. Accessing a folder’s list with a large number of files is agonizingly slow (and didn’t Vista start as Longhorn, a faster file-accessing goal?)

   Features were also ripped out and tripped over. The picture editor, which I enjoyed toying with, is now bare-bones, stripped of the cool little editing tools. The media center doesn’t even have a progress bar to skip through (not to mention it plays DVDs with an awful horizontal misalignment / lag). And surprise…navigating it is slower!

   Windows Defender, the spyware & unwanted program monitor is turned off by default, supposedly to avoid further antitrust problems for Microsoft (but isn’t Vista’s tech pitch that it’s more secure?!). So you’ll need to dig through and turn it on.

   It seems as if Microsoft set a date to make money, failed at their initial goal of writing a new file management architecture, and pieced together a last-minute cosmetic skin to meet that deadline. Maybe it could be a fantastic OS. Maybe it already is, and just falls short of my last one. Maybe MS just completely screwed the pooch on their business strategy and customer goodwill. Til they provide free XP to existing Vista users to allow side-by-side comparison, I can’t stomach the Mojave advertisements of “surprise…it’s Vista!”
   Rating: 1 / 5

3. Emil Lambrache (1 comments) on November 23rd, 2009 4:44 pm

   You cannot beat the market dictatorship run by Intel together with Microsoft. AMD has created a much better processor than Intel and introduced it faster into the market, but the AMD Turion X2 64bit is not 100% supported by Microsoft. When I tried to install the Windows Vista 64bit, after 70% done the installation failed and when I tried the Windows Vista 32bit, it failed after 96%. 96% supported does not make it work. So I had to throw away my AMD-based laptop and had to buy an Intel-based laptop instead. I figured out my fight is doomed and I had lost enough money and time already resisting the Wintel monopoly. Very sad.
   
   The money I spent on Vista, wasted as well. HP warns about Windows XP not actually running on the AMD processores unless using HP fixes, but I needed to upgrade to Vista. So do not buy HP with AMD processors if you want to use them more than a year.
   Rating: 1 / 5

4. Chitown Reader (1 comments) on November 23rd, 2009 4:57 pm

   As has been reported by many other reviewers, there are significant problems with Vista. Yet despite its flaws, it is a great user friendly product, which explains in large part its continued dominance as the desktop operating system.
   Rating: 4 / 5

5. Shelley Shay (1 comments) on November 23rd, 2009 7:08 pm

   I have heard so many people complaining about Vista and now I know why. The overhead in this OS is way over the top. I have a brand new iMac – and when I say brand new, I don’t just mean for me – this particular model just started rolling off the assembly lines 3 weeks ago. It’s a 24″ model with a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz processor and 512MB of dedicated graphics memory. I installed Vista using VMWare Fusion which is rated to be faster with Vista than via Parallels per the latest benchmarks published in PC Magazine.

   Even the box this thing came in was confusing. It took me 10 minutes to figure out how I was supposed to open this odd acrylic box without destroying it.

   VMWare Fusion had the whole system installed in about an hour and a half – one of the fastest Windows installs I’ve seen, other than when I installed XP, of course.

   I don’t have any apps to run in Vista, so I spent hours just trying out every feature I could to get a good appraisal of it and to give an adequate review.

   It starts up slower than XP, likely to do to the bloated overhead. Right-clicking doesn’t get the snappy response it should. Apparently my 512MB of graphics memory is insufficient for Vista – because only the Windows Flag screensaver will run – the others tell me I need a new graphics card. Hello? It has 512 MB of dedicated VRAM. How many GB of graphics memory does Vista need?

   Ok – no big deal, so I just can’t review the screensavers – fine. Then I went to play Freecell. I’m not sure what was going on in the board room meetings in Redmond when they decided to work on existing games in Windows – but yowza – the overhead is ridiculous. You never have played Freecell this slow in your life.

   Things that should be very low overhead like WordPad, the Start Menu, etc. are just stuttery slow. I mean it is torture. The system is also frankly, patronizing. Do computer users really need to be alerted when they open an empty folder with the text “This folder is empty” ? A lot of alerts that repeat over and over seem to assume that the user is not simply new to computing, but also incapable of forming short term memories.

   As with Windows the alt-tab key combo cycles through applications, on the Mac, command-tab cycles through apps as well. Because there was no overt way to remap the keys on the Windows side, I was unable to activate the Windows flip feature. I’ve yet to try Vista in BootCamp – but it’s something I would never do in real life. I’m a Mac user. If I use Windows, it’s because I have to, not because I want to – and I want Windows open in another window so I can copy-paste and drag and drop between the two operating systems.

   It may not be fair to compare apples to oranges here, but I have no other reference point. When Apple came out with each new version of it’s Mac OS X operating system iterations, there were loads of videos telling you how to take advantage of all the features. The new OS, Leopard, runs on my 6-year-old Mac w/o any upgrading and it flies on it. Even with SP1, Vista is just slower by an order of magnitude than XP.

   I use XP at work and was very frustrated moving from Office 2003 to 2007 because all of the menus I knew were gone and moved around. I feel the same way with Vista – familiarity is simply not embraced with this ‘upgrade’ – you are simply thrown into a whole new environment, replete with many of the old problems, at a much slower pace.

   As a Mac user, I buy a new Mac approximately every 5 years… that’s all I need to really stay current and on top of the latest technologies and software. With Windows, however, you really need a new CPU every 2 years or sooner to make sure your hardware is space-age savvy enough to be able to run the glitz from the new software that Redmond rolls out. I don’t see overt advantages to Vista. Their built-in firewall tries to protect you, but to the point of torturing you to death. It is less intuitive to use than its predecessors and I don’t see what it does that’s new that makes an ‘upgrade’ worthwhile. This entire OS seems like an utter failure. This is not simply a preference issue of Mac over Windows – putting preferences aside, Vista is simply slow. It has too much bloat compared to XP to make it a pleasant change. If it’s more advanced, it should be more compatible (not less), snappier (not slower) and easier to use (not increasingly less intuitive)… especially at the cost – it should be doing something good for you, not punishing you.
   Rating: 1 / 5

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