Vista under fire

Duncan McLeod

Duncan McLeod is the editor of Techcentral and a columnist for Financial Mail. Dun won various award over the last decade, including the Telkom...

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Windows Me was such a bad operating system that even Microsoft officials admitted to me in private at the time that the company had made a mistake in releasing what was at best “beta” code. Why did the company do it? Windows XP was still a year away and the company was clearly itching to squeeze the last drops of blood it could out of its dying, DOS-based Windows 95 and 98 franchise.

The technology press lambasted Microsoft for releasing the software, which constantly plagued users with the infamous “blue screen of death” — the screen that inevitably meant it was time to reboot. Many consumers who made the mistake of installing it — I was one of them — quickly backtracked to Windows 98. Last May, PC World, an influential US IT magazine, listed Windows Me as the fourth-worst technology product of all time. “Forget Y2K, this was the real millennium bug,” wrote PC World journalist Dan Tynan.

Is Microsoft repeating history with Vista, its shiny new operating system released in January? If one believes the news reports, it seems consumers are far from happy with Microsoft’s latest offering. Some people are even drawing parallels between Windows Me and Vista. In my experience, Vista is not nearly as awful as Me. But Microsoft is having problems convincing consumers why they should not simply continue using XP.

Computer maker Dell recently conceded that a considerable number of its customers are demanding XP instead of Vista preinstalled on new PCs. A Dell official said recently that the company was “stepping back” from telling people they must upgrade to Vista.

According to computer industry magazine CRN, system builders and value-added resellers have taken to “ripping the much-ballyhooed operating system off desktops and notebooks at a breakneck pace because of the problems that come with moving clients to Vista”. Worse still, CRN discovered in comprehensive laboratory testing that Vista and XP are equally at risk to viruses and exploits and that, overall, Vista brings only marginal security advantages over XP.

But perhaps the biggest criticism of Vista has been its insatiable hunger for system resources. It will run on a PC with 1GB of RAM, but 2GB is strongly preferred. By contrast, XP ran happily on 512MB. Vista’s nifty Aero interface — the eye candy that makes it look so good — is also a resource hog, consuming memory and processor cycles.

Personally, I’ve had mixed success with Vista. I installed it on my desktop PC at home, a machine I cobbled together myself with components from various sources. This machine, which runs XP and Ubuntu Linux perfectly, suddenly developed a habit of rebooting randomly several times a day. So, instead, I installed Vista on my notebook, a ThinkPad, which proved a more rewarding experience. Still, after a couple of months, I couldn’t really see any benefit in running Vista over XP, other than for staring at the cute graphics. So, I formatted the machine’s hard drive and replaced Vista with Ubuntu, which has better eye candy than Vista anyway.

Other users have also had mixed success with Vista. Of a small sample of SA technology journalists I spoke to for this column, some thought Vista worked just fine; others strongly disliked it — for various reasons. I found a similar reaction when I polled nontechnical colleagues, with most Vista users who disliked it complaining about its hefty hardware requirements.

Vista is, however, no Windows Me. And for that we ought to be thankful.

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