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The trouble with Vista

When Windows XP hit the market people lined up overnight to be the first to purchase it.

When Windows XP hit the market people lined up overnight to be the first to purchase it. It was a major improvement over Windows 98 and Windows ME, and quickly became the bona fide standard for PCs — despite some security issues, some plug and play issues with peripherals, and the fact that Microsoft still hadn’t conquered the blue screen of death.

The first two service packs resolved many of those issues, and by Service Pack 2 the XP platform was more or less perfected. Microsoft Service Pack 3, which is available in beta test form, is even better and embraces next generation processors and systems.

At the same time, there’s no question that Vista — which was created to replace XP — has had its share of problems since it launched. It’s not that it’s a bad operating system, but people are disappointed. I got a chance to try a laptop with Vista Home Premium and I can confirm that the experience was underwhelming.

First of all, it was very slow to boot up. Setting it up was also time consuming — if you don’t know anything about computers it could take you hours just to get started.

Secondly, the number of error and update messages is truly frustrating, and there is no way to automate those features so it never asks you again. Why does the printer driver need to check for updates every time I turn the system on?

Although the Aero interface is far better than XP, Apple still does it better. Vista is still too complicated, and not nearly as intuitive as it should be. Instead of simplifying the platform for the mass market, it seems more complex.

One of the main reasons Vista might be slow is its size — more than 7 GB for most versions — which means the software constantly has to refer to the hard drive so it doesn’t overwhelm your memory. That takes time, which might explain why it takes so long to open and close programs, move files around, handle updates, and generally respond to my points and clicks. It wasn’t that the laptop I was using was underpowered because it wasn’t — it probably had the fastest hardware for a computer that I’ve ever used.

Another theory for the lower speeds is digital rights management software that is embedded in Vista, which may be spying on your every move to make sure you’re not stealing software.

Whatever the reasons, Vista is slow. CNet (www.cnet.com) also recently did a benchmarking test using Vista and Service Pack 3 on identical machines, and found that XP could handle various applications and actions twice as fast as Vista.

Microsoft said they were aware of issues, and would try to resolve many of them with the release of Service Pack 1 for Vista sometime in 2008.

If it is a security or copyright issue that’s tying up Vista, I can only say that is a mistake. Pique recently switched from Quark Xpress to Adobe InDesign to handle our layout because of all the security and copyright problems in the most recent edition of Quark. Quark was so concerned that people would use unauthorized copies of their software that they created a licensing system so insidious and dysfunctional that we had not choice but to switch over to their competitor. We lost files, had to unplug our computers and the Internet and restart the program regularly because of flaws in the network registry system. And it crashed so frequently that we started to save files on our desktops instead of the server.

I can only hope that Microsoft hasn’t done the same thing with Vista. Security and theft are a problem, but the last thing you want to do is piss off your paying customers.

Lastly, Vista is having some very frustrating compatibility issues with peripherals like scanners, printers and video cards, as well as files created on other operating systems and various software that has not been upgraded to Vista as of yet.

The result, as you might have seen in the Mac commercials, is that a lot of Vista users are switching back to XP. Computer retailers are starting to give customers the option of whether they want a computer with Vista or XP, and the most recent PC World magazine (www.pcworld.com) even included an article on how to “upgrade” from Vista to XP.

That may sound a little drastic, but people have no confidence in Vista. If you buy a new car and the cup holder jams, then you turn sour on the entire vehicle. If you buy an operating system that doesn’t do one thing you want it to, or work as well or as fast as you hoped, then you sour on the entire operating system. If you focus on the details rather than the big picture it makes sense to downgrade.

But keep in mind that Vista will have its day. Almost 90 million copies of Vista have been sold or bundled with computers at this point, so you can be sure Microsoft is going to keep updating and upgrading Vista until they get it right. Give it time.