It was one year ago today that Microsoft cut the ribbon on Windows Vista and sent it to the manufacturers. At the time programs were plagued with issues, device manufacturers hadn’t released updated drivers, and the available security software (antivirus, firewall, etc…) was extremely limited.
I moved over to the final release of Vista shortly after the consumer launch in January 2007, and it was still a little rough around the edges. As time went on Microsoft patched some of the troubling issues, but more importantly software developers updated their applications. Looking through my repertoire of software I just realized that almost all of my programs have been updated to be fully compatible with Vista, device manufacturers such as ATI have almost all released Vista-compatible drivers for their main hardware lineup, and the security software is once again becoming plentiful.
There are still people who complain about how terrible Vista is, many of which haven’t tried Vista for more than a few minutes. Is it the operating system that we all expected? Absolutely not, but Microsoft did an amazing job of adding the fit and finish that I would expect from them. At first glance it won’t feel all that different than XP, but take a closer look under the surface and you’ll appreciate Microsoft’s attention to detail.
Oh, and I wanted to clear up one of the most common complaints that I hear about Vista: memory usage. After a little while of using Vista you’ll more than likely notice that it uses a lot more memory than XP ever did, at times even twice as much. This is because of Vista’s SuperFetch technology which analyzes which programs you use the most, and preloads them into your memory. That way when you start a program it will appear almost instantly. Personally I love this feature, and I’m happy to see that Windows is finally making use of my RAM instead of just having it sit there.
Happy birthday Vista, and I’m looking forward to Service Pack 1!
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Tags: Software, Windows, Microsoft, Windows Vista
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Happy Birthday Vista!
In my opinion, to say Microsoft gave “attention to detail” with Vista is a load of bollocks. The UI is inconsistent throughout. There are still many legacy features lying around from Win Xp, 2000, 98 and even 3.1. And some wonderful, helpful things from previous Windows versions have been removed - what for? Hell knows. Hide them by all means, but to remove them altogether?
Anyways, I mustn’t be seeing what you’re seeing. I respect your opinion, but beg to disagree.
I still wont give dollars to buy this OS. Linux does fine for me.
Excellent article. I must say I’ve rarely seen Vista ram sucking fame explained that shortly and precisly: prefetching is the exact answer. Justifying so the minimal MS requirements of 1Go and of course above to get a fluid aero and V.GUI features enabled, for launching apps immediatly for most.
Soon becoming a standard when the PC park will be reniewed, and people knowledge updated on Vista as on its costs.
Hmmm … nice try … but it’s funny that I haven’t met a networking / security guy yet who would even dream of deploying this across a network.
For SP1 MS will have to pull a fast talking bunny from the hat. And that bunny will have a lot of explaining to do to a lot of people.
XP SP3 … SP4 … you get the picture.
“M.O.T.S” wrote what is above.
Vista deployement on a network is far from being a dream.
And MS will provide explanations it juges usefull with SP1 fixes. I’m not sure at all “a lot” is due, though.
On the other hand, sp3 for xp fans is a market question almost.
Finally, like any other, windows os (es) always evolve. PCs too.
By the way, MS has finally caught the nigerian PC’s market to a frenchy who had pratically concluded with Nigeria gov a market on providing…let’s another os. Well done Ballmer!
I agree with that especially because Vista is so much larger than XP, but I do give Microsoft credit for cutting the install time in half when performing a fresh install off of the DVD.
Ryan - how about a “What Ever Happened To … Longhorn?” segment? Since you guys have somewhat bravely taken an open minded approach to Vista - taking care to highlight features you think are worthy of consideration - it would be interesting to find out just how many of these concepts were inherited from the Longhorn white papers.
It seems that the original Longhorn team - keen to rewrite the OS from scratch and deliver it as a new fangled 64 bit fully integrated package - got sidelined in the end by MS executive management who may have been concerned about keeping the new OS closer to existing NT based systems alive for compatibility reasons. Hence the delays as politicking prevailed. [ based on industry gossip, nothing more ]
I wonder also where Vista fits into MS’s long term goals? Is it just some “intermission music” while they plan to move into commodity based computing, following rival Apple’s success with iPods, iPhones, iOrgasmatrons? Mobile gadgets and virtualized apps / OSes are the soup du jour.
Wot u thunk?
That’s a great idea for an article. I’ve heard the same thing about the Longhorn team getting pushed to the side to promote backwards application compatibility.
In terms of where Vista fits into Microsoft’s goals I would say that it is just an interim release. We’re still supposed to see an entirely new file system at some point, codenamed WinFS (Windows Future Storage), which was actually one of the things pulled from Vista. I’m expecting that the next release of Windows will make up for what everyone thought Vista lacks, especially since the manager who came up with the idea of the Office 2007 ribbon is now on the Windows team.