signal & noise

Six months ago I put Vista Home Premium on the main machine, partly because the new PC came with it and partly because I wanted to know whether the complaining was fair.

Mostly fair, it turns out, though not for the reasons people say.

The look is fine. I like the Aero glass more than I expected to, and the search box in the Start menu is the single best thing Microsoft has added since XP. I type three letters and the program opens. I don’t remember the last time I clicked through All Programs.

UAC is annoying but I’ve made my peace with it. The real problem is drivers. My scanner has no Vista driver and the manufacturer has “no plans” to release one. My TV tuner card works, but only with software that crashes once a day. The printer driver is a 140MB download for a printer.

The other thing nobody warned me about is how much memory it wants. With 1GB it was sluggish; with 2GB it’s fine. If you’re buying a machine with Vista on it this year, do not let them sell you 1GB.

Would I go back to XP? On the laptop, I never left. On the desktop, no. But I understand why people are asking for downgrades.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Rants, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.