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Vista Or Not Vista

Vista or No Vista
That is the question

About a year ago, in November 2006, I wrote an article about Vista after having the final release version thoroughly tested but before it was released to broad public distribution.

Click here for the article.

Vista was released as scheduled in late January. Since then it has been under scrutiny from all corners and it has not been getting rave reviews – to say the least.  As a frequent reader of tech news I see a lot of negative reviews and a few so-so ones.

I think the most useful things are facts so here’s some that I collected over these months:

• Based on the same hardware, a Windows XP machine performs better than a Windows Vista machine. Windows XP needs 256MB of RAM to run decently (512 if you have some memory eater software like Norton, or McAfee). Vista needs at least 1GB to run smoothly.
• There are numberous hardware driver issues. Older hardware which has only XP drivers provided will most likely not work with Vista. I’ve seen this mainly with printers.
• Not all software runs without glitches on Vista that ran perfectly on XP. I encountered this with several of my utilities that I simply can’t use on Vista. This is getting better over time but it’s most definitely an issue currently.
• XP is back by popular demand. I know for sure that Dell put XP back as a choice for operating system when you buy a new computer – I’m sure that there are other vendors too. And according to news the option to have XP on a new computer is extended till middle of 2008.
• Better security with Vista. So far Vista proved to be more secure than XP. I have not been called up to clean malware off of a Vista machine — yet… I guess the “allow or deny” prompts work even though they are quite a nuisance.

Now, there are other things that I could bring up but I cannot present them as facts simply because I do not have first hand experience with them.

So everything except the last thing tips the scale toward XP. Security issues in XP actually mainly stem from failing to keep the computer updated with security patches – I still see computer with Service Pack 1 or no service pack on XP. These systems can be infected with the greatest of ease. With updates correctly handled and with some common sense security measures XP can be just as safe as Vista.

Conclusion:

My firm advice is: unless you have some compelling reason to chose Vista, stay with XP or if you are buying a new computer try to get one with XP.

Laszlo

PS: 27 Nov 2007: An article just came out in InformationWeek:  Windows XP Significantly Outperforms Vista, Tests Show

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