Vista Sucks Big Time
By R. Adkins
Vista, the much hyped up, latest, Bill Gates offering to the world, sucks big time in my opinion.
My daughter bought a new laptop last week. Once she got it home, she could not wait to show me this laptop with a gig of ram, 85 gig hard drive, and Vista Home Premium as the operating system. She was kind enough to let me take a look at the new laptop and Vista.
When I booted the laptop, I sat watching the screen. It had some great graphics on the boot up screen, but it became quite apparent that this operating system took a lot more time, than Windows XP, to boot. I sat waiting; to me it seemed a long time, but it finally booted and the laptop was up and running,
Personally, I run some pretty old computers in my house; a P2 450 with 128 megs of ram and a P3 800 with 384 megs of ram, so I was expecting great things when this laptop had a gig installed. To tell the truth, I was disappointed in the speed of the machine, but then I realized this thing uses half the ram just to run the operating system. To me, that seemed to be an incredible amount of ram needed. It made me wonder what it will use when it has been installed for six months and the registry gets bloated.
One of the things that annoyed me right away were the pop-ups that ask if you want to do this or that. The permission thing drove me nuts after a few minutes, and if I owned the computer, it would be the first thing that I would turn off.
Vista's eye candy looks great; the start menu is close enough to XP's that I don't think it would confuse many Windows XP users, but the way the system does things has changed. As my daughter did not have too much installed on the machine, there was not much I could do with it. I checked out the office program but it is more than I would ever need.
In the stores today, curious to see the price, I walked over to the software department. Having seen the prices on the different Vista boxes, I would not consider buying it. Here again is where Vista sucks. It will suck the money right out of your wallet!
If you are running XP, I personally cannot see anything on Home Premium that would warrant an upgrade. My advice is stick with XP until you really do need a new computer. Apparently I am not alone in my thinking as today's reports say that retailers have sold only half the amount of shrink-wrapped Vistas to date as they did when Windows XP was launched. Also, Microsoft has dialed back expectations on profits because of the lack of sales. Vista sucked the share price down as well.
Will I upgrade to Vista? Nope, I will upgrade to PCLinuxOS 2007 being released around the end of this month. It is coming with 3d (yes I know Vista has that), it has translucency (yes I know Vista has that), it has beautiful eye candy (yes I know Vista has that) and it also comes with a complete Graphical User Interface (GUI). In other words, you don't need to use a command line tool, (yes, I know, Vista does that as well) and it is FREE! (I know, Vista does not do that.)
Definition of free? Free to download, free to share, free to modify, free to install on as many computers as you need it to be installed on, free to give to your friends and family! Yes, I know Vista does not do THAT! I always did say PCLinuxOS was better than Windows - it does more than Vista!