Review by Veil_Lord

I got my computer with Vista pre-installed. It seems to vary depending on who gets it, some are lucky and it runs fine, while others have nothing but trouble. I fall into the second group. For me it’s slow, buggy, bloated, and annoying. Until service pack 1 was released, I wasn’t able to right-click without crashing Explorer. No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. I couldn’t right-click without crashing Explorer! It was fixed for a while, but I’ve started having the issue again. Fun.

Copying files takes much longer than in XP. Several times longer. My boot times are longer. My shutdown times are longer. I work on an Office Live website and MS can’t even get Vista to play nice with their connection software out of the box. I was forced to use an aging XP laptop just to update files on it. Thankfully they do have pretty good customer service and I was able to solve that issue with a combination of patches and workarounds. Still, Vista required more work for me than XP did and that’s the problem with Vista.

Now there are some nice features. The voice recognition for typing is really very good, I don’t mind the UAC pop-ups asking for permission for a program to do some activity, the screen shot program is really helpful, and the DVR software is just wonderful. However, the good just doesn’t out weigh the bad. Vista has caused me many hours of stress and anger. If you’re upgrading, just go with Windows 7. It’s the most current one anyway now and it runs the way they should have released Vista.