Wednesday, December 16, 2009

What is up with Windows Vista?

I bought a Gateway referbished laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium.  I have heard horror stories about Vista, and one of the reasons I chose this particular laptop is it came with a free upgrade to Windows 7.  I am waiting for it to be shipped to me, as the Gateway web site says of my shipment: "Fulfillment in process."

In the meantime I figured I would give it a real try before succumbing to the bandwagon of Vista haters.  In the past week, Vista has not been totally horrible.  It looks a little slick, and feels a little like a Mac or Linux in it's differentness.  But there are three things that bother me:

1. Vista misreports my hard drive size.  My hard drive is 320 GB.  Vista reports it at 289 GB.  And, yes, I do have it set to show hidden folders and have unhidden system files.  There is no other partition, and I have reset the shadow file size to 10 GB.  That is a missing 20 GB.  I understand they round up when hard drives are marketed, but not 60 GB of rounding.  Well, it is a referb after all - maybe they messed up the hard drive formatting and it isn't a Vista problem?

2. Vista has new updates every day, and they usually require a restart.

3. Every time I start certain programs there is a nag screen that says Windows needs my permission to start this unidentified program.  It happens with DreamweaverMX 2004, for example.  I thought that once you told Vista it was a safe program, the nag would go away.  But it hasn't.  And I can't find a way to tell Vista that I don't want that warning to display.

So far, I have one piece of hardware that is incompatible; a web cam.  I have not tried my printer or scanner with Vista yet, but that point is moot because this laptop doesn't even have a parallel port.  I will be using those peripherals from my older desktop.

1 comment:

REL said...

Vista is a huge failure for Microsoft as it has no sex appeal or practical usage except it reduces occurrences of viruses by locking down all functionality (You bullet point #3)