Is Vista Really That Bad?
I'm not the earliest, but I am one of the earlier adopters to Windows Vista, having purchased the Ultimate Edition in March of 2007 and using it as my primary operating system since. I don't know what the sales numbers are for Vista these days (they're better than the public's perception of them though) and I'm not going to talk about that, I'm just going to share my experiences with Vista and a few thoughts on if it's right for you.
The primary reason for my upgrade to Vista was for the Windows Media Center suite. I wanted to watch and record cable programming on my television set. I own an ATI TV Tuner card and it worked decently, but I bought the a la carte version (no included software) and the free software I could find was less than impressive. Using Media Center has been a complete bust unfortunately. Vista doesn't support my TV tuner card. ATI tells me the default Vista drivers work but I can say most assuredly that they do not. Their stance though is that they do work and as such, they have no intention of releasing updated Vista drivers for my card.
I think this is a common issue between Microsoft and hardware makers and has been a source of a large volume of the complaints against Vista. Both companies expect the others to fix the issue (and in some instances claim the other has). I know Microsoft is working on fixing many of these issues, but for such a massive base of hardware, you can't really expect them to make everything work. Hardware vendors should pick up the slack and develop drivers that work for Vista, using Microsoft in a supporting role to get them working right when they don't natively work with Microsoft drivers. Of course, if your old hardware doesn't work (unless you're bullheaded like me), you'll give in and buy new hardware so the incentive for companies like ATI to fix these issues aren't that great to begin with and Microsoft is taking the brunt of the bad press for it.
My second complaint with Windows Vista is "SuperFetch". The basic idea of SuperFetch is to keep commonly used programs in memory so that you can access them quickly when the need arises. I have a PC with 3 gigs of memory, and SuperFetch had a tendency to fill all but 20 or so Megs of this with these commonly used programs and then anytime I needed to do any task, I needed to use virtual memory. Initially this wasn't too bad, but after a couple weeks, the computer was borderline unusable. I'm not exaggerating when I say everything I tried to do required a hard drive read/write. Somewhere along the line SuperFetch must have worked to speed up something, but even after a complete reformat/reinstall of the Operation System, I had the same issues. Disabling this service improved performance for me in Vista tenfold.
I've have a continuing issue with my HP multi-function printer as well, though to be fair I haven't taken much time to try and resolve said issue. It seems that whenever I cycle the power to my printer (which is a network printer with its own IP Address), Vista can't find it anymore without completely reinstalling the printer. It doesn't seem to matter that the IP address hasn't changed; it doesn't exist anymore as far as Vista is concerned. This was never an issue with XP and the same printer.
I have problems with my CD/DVD burner too. It's a relatively new Lite-On burner that worked flawlessly in Widows XP but is very much flawed in Vista. Regardless of which software I use (Nero, the built in Windows burning software, or any of a number of freeware/trial options), 3 out of every 4 discs I burn end up being blank despite the burn process claiming to have completed successfully (it’s not the media either unless coincidently the top half of my burnable CDs and DVDs, which I burned in Windows XP using Nero, were good and the rest of the packages were bad). Once this issue starts happening, the only chance to burn anything correctly is to reboot<
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