Book Acela now - Amtrak.com
- Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 89 reviews Back to product review
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28 out of 29 people found this review helpful
2.5 stars
"I hope this is all worked out by February..."
Pros: Great stability. Some very cool features. Very Simplistic. The best voice recognition system ever incountered. Will run quite well with almost minimal requirements.
Cons: At current state, not recommended for home users. Very annoying unless you know how to turn off some of the features. You have to give yourself drive access permissions to your own HDD. Nesting.
Summary: Ok,
First of all, I'd like everyone to know that I am an IT professional and I do technical support for a manufacturer. With that said, I feel like I should at least speak out a bit of the new Windows Vista as it is released now. First of all, with Windows Vista in it's current state, I strongly recommend installing it as it's own separte OS on it's own separate partition instead of upgrading. One thing is that this particular OS has it's very good, and also very bad points. One good point is it's stability. Amoung all of the MS NT versions of Windows, I must say that Vista is the most stable out of all of them, however, at it's current state, the earliest version of Windows that you can upgrade to it from is Windows XP Service Pack 2. However, the good side to that is Vista's installation saves everything from your previous installation to another folder called Windows.old. I experienced this very situation when attempting to upgrade a secondary copy of Windows 2000 on an auxilary partition on my computer's hard drive. One thing I should also note is that my system at home is a 1.9 GHZ AMD Sempron with only 512MB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce MX 4000 128MB video card, and an 80GB split up (20GB = Windows XP MCE 05 Partition, and a 60GB = Was Windows 2K and is now Windows Vista Ultimate) Quantum HDD. Whoo, try saying all that in one breath... Anyway, moving on, no, I did not get to experience Aero or Flip 3D at home, however, I am mostly just testing Vista for work and research purposes, so, really, just did not see it as a very big deal. When I first started to use it, I quickly set my usual options as I usually do (folder options to show everything, control panel in classic style, etc....), and thought I was done there. First thing I noticed is that when I attempted to get the usual icons to show up on the desktop (My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, Internet Explorer, etc....), they were not in any usual place to be found, like within the Display Properties under a Desktop tab or something. No, you had to right mouse click on the icon in the Windows style start menu, or set the start menu to classic style in order to get them to appear, and even then sometimes, if you use the full Windows start menu (which I do in XP for the convienience), not all the icons will be able to appear. One thing I did not like about the new start menu is the "nesting" of it, which seems to be a common theme in Vista. Almost everything in this OS is nested in something else. Imean, I one who's all for an object oriented layout, but there comes a point where you've gotta say... Enough! I know the desktop search is suppossed to alieviate the pain of nesting, however, like most users, they will forget that the feature is even there, and therefore, maybe less likely to even use it. I honestly think there should be three options of everything in Windows Vista (Windows Classic Style, Windows XP Style, Windows Vista Style) at this point. As far as I see it, the Windows Explorer interface in Vista is very, very simplistic. Maybe a little too simplistic without tool tips. You also have to go into folder options to show menus even. I also noticed that the address bar has become more like the "Up Folder(s)" bar. That is a very cool feature, although, you know, I wish there was a tool tip to have notified me of this so I would not sound stupid asking "Where is the up folder button." One other thing I noticed was that everytime I wanted to run a program, install something, etc, I'd get attack by the User Access Control which, I do have to say is the most annoying feature of all and should not be turned on from the beginning when you first use the OS. Be advised that sometimes this would not let me install somethings as well. I quickly found this feature under Windows Security and disabled it. I also changed the way that security center alerts me so I wouldn't be hounded by that little red shirld for turning off user access control. What was also very annoying and time consuming was finding out that I had to give myself full permissions to use the partition that it was on, even if I was set as an Administrator. Also, I had to go in and do this because Vista locked out the partition from the other OSes on my computer, and this was my partition for storing music files, downloads, etc. One thing that I mentioned before was that I replaced the OS that was on the partition with Vista. When the install moved old windows files and documents and settings to the Windows.old folder, it created and not quite a shortcut, not quite a folder junction file to my old documents and settings on the root of the drive/partition, however, before I gave myself full permission to use that partition, I would click on it, and would tell me that "Access is Denied." I simply then went into rhe windows.old folder, and accessed my old files there, however, I try to copy my old documents and settings folder back to the root of the drive and the junction file kept redirecting it back. Once I gained the proper permissions, the junction file was the first thing I deleted and then I copied the folder back. Just a note, in Vista, the old documents and settings folder no longer exists. Instead, it is replaced with a "Users" folder in the root. I did not have much of a problem running my older programs and stuff once I got through all the afformentioned junk. My final words on Windows Vista is that it's a really good and extremely stable version of Windows, however, more tips, assistance, and maybe a slight step back and less security needs to be presented to the average user right from the get-go.
I hope my opinion helped a few of you and hope you'll enjoy.
- 3 replies to this review
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WOW - Not Quite - more like HUH!
It's easy to see that Microsoft were trying to achieve a whole new look for Vista and office 2007 but I don'r really see the point to the whole new feel. We have all spent years getting to know the ins and out of Windows and Office in their various incarnations and just when we think we've got it down ... VISTA! I'm all for shiny and new, I just don't see why some of the well trodden navigation paths had to be changed.
Maybe I'm just too old fashioned! -
No of those problems happened to me when i installed it, and i could easily transfer my files from windows old. to my new folder. Also with the desktop items to get them there all you have to do is to be on the desktop right click then go properties and in the left side pain it will say change desktop items.
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Well, Microsoft said they were putting new security in Windows Vista. Talk about bugs Bill Gates was at the electornic expo and the machine he was showing off to everyone had Windows Vista on it. The computer crashed. Hows that for showcasing a new operating system. As for the annoying security allert screens, I think they might have gone a little too far with the security. I am not an IT professional but I do a little bit of building computers and a very little bit of programming as a hobby, my guess would be in order to make it more secure try building a new operating system completely from scratch, instead of building on what they already have.
Look at XP it was built on NT and windows 2000 security. Hackers already reverse engineered the code and found security gaps to exploit.
LIKE I SAID MICROSOFT WILL NEVER LEARN THEY ARE USING CODE THAT HACKERS HAVE ALREADY BROKE INTO.
