SemiConscious Dot Org

Now there’s an appetizing post title, eh?

Ok, so you may have noticed that I’ve been awfully hard on Windows Turd Sandwich Vista. Maybe you thought it was a little disingenuous of me to continually slam an operating system I had never actually owned or used, based solely on secondhand information I read online.

Well, now it’s firsthand, folks. My new employer issued me a laptop, and it came preloaded with Vista. I asked if it would be acceptable for me to upgrade to XP, but was told that, since we’ll be increasingly be asked to administer client computers that run Vista, we might as well learn to use it ourselves. I’ve now been using the laptop extensively for a week, long enough to offer some preliminary thoughts.

First off, Vista is every bit the bloated monster you’ve been warned about. My laptop is brand new and seriously souped up, with a 1.8 GB dual core processsor and three gigabytes of RAM…and it’s still slower than my four year old home computer, which has an old 2.1 Gig Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM, and can boot in either XP or Ubuntu. Yup, that’s right: despite having almost twice the processing speed and six times the memory, it still takes longer to boot up, log in, and open and run programs. Hell, it’s comparable in speed to my Ubuntu laptop, which is almost ten years old, runs on a Pentium 3, and has only 128MB of RAM.

Vista’s not just bloated in the performance sense, either. The operating system and drivers take up 20 gigs of space on the hard drive, and that’s not even including the extra full gig occupied by the amazingly buggy and crash-prone Office 2007. XP, which upon its release drew complaints from users for its space-hogging, uses up about a quarter the drive space of Vista. Ubuntu? Less than a fifth.

“Alright, that’s some serious bloat,” you’re no doubt saying right about now. “But if it’s better, the tradeoff is worth it.” Alas, no: Improvements fall overwhelmingly in the Window Dressing category. Sure, the Aero desktop is kind of cool looking, but are translucent windows and neat widgets in the corner of the screen really worth all the resource gluttony? And yes, you can turn off Aero and save your processor, but if you’re not using it, then why did you bother forking out all the money for Vista in the first place?

I honestly thought that being forced use Vista would cause me to gain some grudging respect for it. I figured that firsthand experience would lead me to discover neat new features that would counteract all the negative press I’ve read about it. Thus far, it ain’t happening, kids. None of the supposed benefits have bowled me over, and the drawbacks are even more aggravating than I had figured they’d be. Add in the staggering price (anywhere from $150 for an upgrade to the cheapest version to $400 for a full install of the high-end variety) and it’s just not worth it.

Conclusion: Microsoft will sell seventy zillion copies.