Anyone who knows me will tell you that I prefer Apple products. I own both a Macbook and an iMac, and they have been the only two computers I have ever bought personally for myself. But that is not to say that I have not used Windows extensively. The first operating system I ever used was Windows 3.1 and I enjoyed the experience. I was barely five years old and can actually remember getting the computer. I played MS-DOS games such as flight simulator, Into the Eagles Nest, and Scorched Earth and Sim City for Windows. It never crashed. Really, never in my memory do I remember the OS crashing or giving me a blue screen, black screen, or any other colored screen. In fact the computer is still in my parents house and it works perfectly fine to this day. Then we had Windows 95, 98 Second Edition, and eventually XP(we skipped over the whole Windows ME atrocity). Through years of Windows use I never really grew disgruntled until XP. Maybe it was the Fisher Price color palette, or the fact that I got a blue screen 4 times a day, or the fact that until SP2 the OS was basically a playground for viruses, or maybe it was the fact that I have to reinstall any new machine because of all the pre-installed bloatware.
As a self proclaimed ‘Hardcore Gamer’ I wanted a gaming rig that I could throw anything at and it would take in stride. So I saved all through high school to get around 3,000 dollars for a respectable gaming rig, because to hell if my parents would pay for any of this for me. But then Vista kept getting delayed, and XP was ugly as sin and console games were suddenly looking just as good as PC games. Then I thought about it and decided Vista wasn’t coming before I was to leave for college and XP was so archaic looking I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to make the switch…
To Ubuntu Linux. Now don’t get me wrong I like the whole open source and Linux movement but I can honestly say that it is not quite ready to be used as an everyday computing environment. It seemed fine and Open Office was usable. But there was just too many things it did not easily play nice with; driver support was all but non-existent and getting some seemingly simple programs to work was cumbersome.
Finally I decided to blindly buy a Macbook, just go in, buy one and see if I liked it. I had researched it extensively and besides a few archaic machines in elementary and middle school my mac experience was non-existent. But, suddenly I was a believer, it wasn’t perfect or completely painless and at times it seems downright restrictive but it works and it works well.
So then about six months after buying my Mac I bought Vista and duel booted with Boot Camp. I had read all the bad reviews, but this was not going to be my main operating system after all, and with updates surely on the way it was bound to only get better. Well it is almost a year later and Vista is just as bad as the day I bought it. So what is so wrong with Vista you ask?
First it is slow, but not in the way you might think. It boots up fast enough and is generally pretty snappy, but for whatever reason the OS hangs on random processes. Insert a disc, downloading a large file, opening the explorer, Vista will all but completely lock up for five minutes or more.
Security is better but at the cost of having an annoying “nagging nanny” asking if it is okay to change your wallpaper or user icon or open a file or program. You can turn this feature off, but that negates the protection and there is noway to set it to only ask, for say, files downloaded from the internet; it is all or nothing.
Programs run noticeably slower then on XP. How much slower? You know how nonnative programs run slower under Rosetta on Mac—that much slower.
But my biggest complaint of all is not how the OS performs but rather why did they need to rewrite the code completely to only boost the visuals? Yes I know there are a bunch of new features such as readyboost, gadgets, better explorer, etc., etc. besides being the ugliest OS ever XP and Vista are almost identical. Why did they not just rewrite the code to allow it to have the looks of Vista with the underlying code of XP? It is time to scrap Vista and make Windows XP second edition and concentrate on the next Windows.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Mac, Microsoft, OSX, Ubuntu, Vista
