A year with Windows Vista

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 10:19pm

It has now been a year since I started using Windows Vista on my home desktop. My verdict: it’s not as bad as people say.

But I can’t think of anything in Vista that I actually use in comparison with XP. My typical complement of applications include Firefox, Thunderbird, Putty and VLC. I could even say that if it weren’t for the comparative ease of things TV recording, video editing, DVD burning with windows applications, I could even be running Linux.

So, apart from my initial issue with DVD burning and the later issue with Foxit Reader, it has been solid. I put this down to running it on new hardware (plenty of RAM) and keeping the system simple by not installing unnecessary programs. In fact keeping the system simple is advice than can be applied to any operating system.

However, it is not without some annoyances:

  • Moving, copying and deleting files through explorer is slow. Especially over the network or on USB drives. It isn’t that the transfer speed is slow, it is the pre and post actions that take ages. In comparison performing the same actions from the command line are quick, in particular deleting files. This led me to find TeraCopy which is a must for Vista, it is also handy under XP.
  • I regularily get ‘ghost’ files. These are files that I have deleted or moved through explorer, but hang around (except are not readable) until a reboot.

In short there is nothing wrong with a properly setup Vista install, but if I hadn’t been given a free (but legit) copy of Vista I wouldn’t have bothered.

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2 Responses to “A year with Windows Vista”

  1. Agreed. Vista’s single biggest problem is its handling of files. Speaking of Vista, service pack 2 is out and is said to improve performance again. Office 2007 SP2 is out and that makes a huge difference with Outlook.

    Damien - June 1st, 2009 at 12:15 am

  2. I saw the announcement about SP2 last week and meant to download it, but the only download I could find was the DVD ISO version at 1.3GB. So I didn’t.

    Looking again I have found the 350MB download. Much better. Interesting that the file is called Windows6.0…

    Stephen - June 1st, 2009 at 9:16 am