I was discussing Windows Vista last weekend with a good friend of mine. He asked me an interesting question “Bells and whistles aside, how is Vista as an operating system? Is it still just as functional?”
I had to think about it for a short time. It’s got a slightly changed layout under the start menu, new skin for the startmenu… The control panel is all sorts of changed around… Then I remembered how slow it seems under a configuration which is perfectly snappy with XP. The following was my response
“You walk over across the street to the bookstore, right? Well lets assume doing that is like Windows XP. Now let’s throw a 70lb weight on your back and have you do it. That’s Windows Vista. You can do the same things as before, but because you get some new bells and whistles you find out it takes you much longer, and is much more cumbersome than it was before.”
Matt…I like your 70 lbs. weight analogy. I haven’t heard it put quite like that before.
I haven’t used Vista yet, but have a read a fair amount of reviews. Most of it has been fairly negative. I sometimes wonder if that’s just the blogosphere, or if the average “Mom and Pop” user is also frustrated with Vista.
It seems like Microsoft is losing some of its strength. Shelly Palmer wrote a good essay about it — called “Cracked Windows.” He was saying that, with Web 2.0 apps and stuff (Google Docs, etc.) ,aybe this new OS just isn’t delivering anything that we need:
http://advancedmediacommittee.typepad.com/emmyadvancedmedia/2007/02/cracked_windows.html
Anyway, I’m going to stay away from the 70 lbs. weight, and stick to the…..old weight.
– Alyssa
Alyssa, dependant upon the user the frustration that people face with Vista’s resource heavy requirements seem to be par for the course with the increased requirements from other releases of Windows. Despite having to trudge around with this “70lb weight on my back” I also realize Microsoft wont be releasing another OS for probably about another 5 years or so.
Nice analogy. My thoughts so far have been it seems like a nicer looking, bloated xp, I haven’t really noticed anything ‘amazing’ as far as usability except the much improved search located in the start menu, but I have not used it heavily though.
After beta testing Vista for over a year, then installing the final release, I have to say I can’t stand it. I kept telling myself that bogged down feeling I got while using it was due to the fact that the it was still in beta. I was wrong. To top off the slow factor, they rearranged things that only made using Vista more confusing (as you noted).
I would make the 70lbs analogy more like 150lbs. I kicked Vista off of my computers about a week after the official release. XP and Linux from now on.
Jeremy – I have to agree. Add some more weight on there for the analogy. I also spent some time with the beta which was horrendously slow on a system that was previously quite fast under XP. The final release improved things significantly over the beta but it still lags well behind XP. As Matt mentions, its no different from previous version upgrades but I’ve yet to see any benefit from Vista. I could do everything I needed under XP and much faster.
Well, that takes care of my interest in Vista. Thanks for the info.