Step right up, come on in
If you’d like to take the Grand Tour…
I have nothing here to sell you,
Just some things that I will tell you-
Some things I know will chill you to the bone…

May 8, 2007: This is the day good ol’ mkp51 finally decides to buy a new computer. It’s been six years since I put my trusty Compaq Presario 5004US into service. During that time, my old computer served me very faithfully and very well indeed. All my Epinions and Amazon reviews; all my FunTrivia quizzes; all my countless e-mails, spreadsheets, online games, music downloads, and other computer work since 2001 – were performed on this now venerable machine.

But the times, they were a-catchin’ up with the good ol’ thang, so I started shopping online and in retail stores for a machine that would go “faster, higher, stronger.” I wanted a blazing up-to-date processor, more RAM, a bigger hard drive… you know the drill. After several weeks of sifting through catalogs, web pages, and other computer ads, and a couple of aborted attempts at making an online purchase, I finally settled on an Acer Aspire T690, complete with a Pentium D 925 (3.0 GHZ) dual core processor, a 19-inch widescreen LCD monitor, a 250GB SATA hard drive, 1GB RAM, a DVD/CD-ROM combo player/burner, and a 9-in-1 media reader…

…And Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition pre-loaded on the hard drive.

I’ll save the review of the computer for another time, after Epinions adds my model to its database. For now, I’ll stick to a review of Windows Vista.

I have to confess that, when I bought my machine, I had a lot of misgivings about Windows Vista. It certainly has been no secret that many, many Vista users are, to say the least, a bit disgruntled with Microsoft’s latest operating system. All the while I was computer shopping, I heard from friends and co-workers tales of Vista not loading properly; problems with Vista activation; the ever-present “nag” screens every time a user wants to perform an action; and, most problematic of all, the fact that Vista won’t run a lot of hardware and software. I was so alarmed by these stories that I tried at one point to special order a system with Windows XP pre-loaded. (No dice on that from any manufacturer, unless, of course, I wanted to pay a hefty surcharge. Apparently Microsoft’s attempt to coerce computer manufacturers into shoving Vista down the throats of consumers is paying off…)

I guess the best way for me to approach this review is to tell you my “Windows Vista Horror Story” in a nice, straightforward fashion. Here goes:

When I got my machine home and out of its box, it took very little time to set it up. Since Windows Vista Home Premium Edition came pre-loaded on the hard drive, I figured that all I had to do was fire up the Acer, follow a few on-screen prompts to get Windows Setup going, and wait for the installation to finish. That’s pretty much what happened. Once I initiated Vista setup, it took about 30 minutes for the operating system to install itself completely on my hard drive. It was a smooth and straightforward process, certainly the easiest of any version of Windows I’ve ever used.

Once I got Vista running, I started poking around to see what was different, what was good, and what was not-so-good. My initial impressions were as follows:

As was much ballyhooed, Vista’s graphics are… simply stunning. Colors seem richer and more vibrant; screen resolution seems finer and sharper, and the layout of objects on screen seem well organized, user-friendly, and intuitive. Audio is crisp, clean and sharp to my ears. Now I realize that hardware plays a big part in this, but I think there’s no doubt that the Windows Vista operating system has made a quantum leap over all previous versions of Windows with regards to graphics and sound capabilities.

Within Vista's Home Premium and Ultimate Editions (but not the Home Basic Edition) is a new feature called “Windows Aero.” As I understand it, this is the graphical user interface “shell” for the operating system. Aero adds a plethora of features, such as thumbnails of documents and programs that can be rotated on-screen and selected when the user has more than one program running. I understand there’s a lot more to Aero than that, but that alone pretty much blew my mind. It’s very nice feature indeed, although I’ve come to view it as just so much “eye candy."

One of Vista’s most heavily hyped features is its “improved security…” meaning that Vista is supposed to be much more impervious to outside attacks by viruses, worms, and other malware. From what I can tell, system security “out-of-the-box” certainly appears much stronger than in XP and earlier Windows versions. Vista Home Premium and Ultimate come with Windows Defender (a decent anti-malware program) , but Vista Home Basic does not. (Defender is a free download from the Microsoft web site.)

Vista’s improved security features come at a cost to the user, however. Vista is set up with a component called User Account Control (UAC). Every time a user performs an action that UAC deems a potential threat to system security, it asks for confirmation. A dialog box pops up and the user must take positive action (in the form of a mouse click) to continue. That’s not an insurmountable obstacle if the actions requiring confirmation were few and very far between.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Every time I wanted to install a program; every time I wanted to uninstall a program; every time I wanted to download a file from the Internet; every time I wanted to check my e-mail; every time I wanted to run a utility; every time I ran the autorun program from a CD or DVD… UAC asked for confirmation. At first, this constant nagging didn't seem particularly annoying, but after a while it really began to grate on the ol’ nerves. And after a long while, it began to feel like the road to death from a thousand paper cuts…

At this juncture – about three weeks after buying my computer – the good ol’ “mkp51 Vista Horror Story” kicked into high gear. Until this point, I had some mixed feelings about Vista, but I was still willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

But all those "chicken tales" of Vista’s inability to run certain hardware and software started coming home to roost. When I bought my computer, I also purchased a Maxtor 160GB external USB hard drive. Vista wouldn’t recognize it. It wouldn’t recognize my new Hewlett-Packard C4140 SmartPhoto All-in-One printer either, until I downloaded a whole new set of drivers from the HP web site (all the while enduring yet another flurry of UAC “nag” screens.) Most galling of all, however, was Vista’s refusal to run much of my software.

Now, I’m not discussing just a few minor solitaire or mahjong tile games here. Some of my most important – and expensive – software packages simply would not run from within Vista. (All ran flawlessly from within Windows XP.) In succession, I installed Microsoft Office Professional 97; OpenOffice.org 2.2; Chessmaster 9000; Melody Assistant 7.6.1; and OneTouch Diabetes Management software. All experienced significant failures from within Vista. Office 97 would run Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but not Access or Outlook. OpenOffice.org also could not initialize its database. (Both database programs gave “out-of-memory" error messages.) Melody Assistant (an excellent and very reliable music composition program I’ve used for about seven years) coughed and hiccupped its way through a couple of scores I wrote, then spontaneously quit. I never got it to launch again. And, most tellingly, my OneTouch Diabetes Management software froze like a Popsicle as soon as I launched it from within Vista. None of these programs had experienced any problems while running from within Windows XP.

Okay, I figured, this should be easy to fix… I'll just run the recalcitrant programs in XP compatibility mode. No dice. They still wouldn’t run. Period. In fact, things actually got worse for OpenOffice.org and Chessmaster.

My next logical step: set up a small partition on my hard drive and install Windows XP for the "problem children" programs; run a Vista/XP multi-boot configuration. It’s been done before with no problems, right?

Wrong.

I created a 40GB partition, installed my trusty Windows XP Home Edition , and re-booted. I expected to see a multi-boot menu come up. What I got instead was a screen telling me that a certain file (hal.dll) was missing or corrupt and needed to be replaced. The system then proceeded to boot straight into XP. All attempts to get my system to boot into Vista met with the same fate.

Okay, booting into XP was fine... except now I only had 40GB out of a 250GB hard drive fully accessible. (I could view the whole drive using XP’s Windows Explorer, but I could take no actions except on files residing on the 40 GB XP partition… something to do with Vista’s UAC.)

At this point, I threw my hands up in the air and – {{{GASP}}} – called Microsoft’s technical support. Making a very long and painful story (mercifully) short, six phone calls lasting an average of 3 hours each netted me the following pearl of wisdom for advice from Microsoft's techno-wizards:

“Reformat your hard drive and start from scratch.”

Wonderful advice, guys… except for one itty-bitty minor detail: I - don’t - own - a - copy - of - the - Vista - Home - Premium - installation - disc. None of my friends do either. (When I explained this to the Microsoft techie, he came dangerously close to suggesting I find a pirated copy... a Microsoft heresy, if ever there was one.) Reluctantly, I went out and bought a copy of the Vista Home Premium Edition Upgrade…

…And found yet another of Microsoft’s dirty little secrets: Microsoft has removed the ability to perform a "clean" installation of Windows Vista with an upgrade version. You can install over a previous version of Windows (XP, 98, etc.), but you can’t perform a "clean" Vista installation on a separate partition in order to run in a "multi-boot" configuration. Unless, of course, you purchase the full-blown version, now selling for a whopping $240.00 (for the Home Premium Edition).

So, what’s my situation now, and my bottom line recommendation? Today I am running Windows XP Home Edition on my computer. Everything works perfectly. I even added Microsoft Office Home and Student Edition, to which I give very high marks. To my knowledge, not one byte of Windows Vista Home Premium Edition resides anywhere on my system.

I do not recommend Windows Vista in any of its current iterations. At this point, seven months after its unleashing on an unsuspecting public, Windows Vista is simply too unstable and too troublesome to deal with, unless you have the time, patience and technical skills to force it to work the way you want it to.

Be forewarned, however: The clock is ticking for Microsoft’s longest running and most successful version of Windows; Windows XP’s days are definitely numbered. (Support for XP ends in 2011.) Microsoft now makes it abundantly clear: Windows Vista is the way of the future. And Microsoft would have you believe that future is here now.
also published at associatedcontent.com

Recommended: No