Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Full Version OEM for PC Review

Okay, I'll admit it; I was one of the computer geeks who were (very) excited about Microsoft's much hyped follow on to Windows XP, Windows Vista.  I was after all a Beta tester and I noticed little niggling things about the Operating System (OS) during that testing, but I was sure they would be addressed upon final release of the OS.  I was only partially right!

I decided to install Windows Vista Ultimate on my primary workstation at home, a Hewlett Packard d520 mini-tower with the following specifications:

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 Processor @ 1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB, 512MB L2 Cache

Memory: 1.5GB DDR SDRAM @ 400MHz;

Video Card: BTG Technologies NVidia GeForce 7200 GS w/ 512MG of VRAM;

Fixed Storage: 80GB 7200rpm SATA drive;

NIC - Wired: Realtek RTL8139/810x Fast Ethernet NIC;

Ports: 1x Parallel printer port; 6x USB 2.0 ports; 1x SVGA; 

OS: Windows XP Professional SP 2

I bought the NVidia GeForce 7200 GS just to install Vista Ultimate because the stock video card just would not do.  The installation went smoothly enough and the system acted as expected for the first few weeks or so, then the trouble started.  And it seems to come all at once, like batch of dark storm clouds over an otherwise calm and peaceful ocean.

Let me preface these next paragraphs by stipulating that this particular PC stays on 24/7/365, and that days can pass without me logging into the computer.  That said I logged into it one morning and noted all sort of things going on.  Windows defender-an anti-spam program that ships with Vista-was locked up trying to get past a lone DLL file; Symantec Antivirus for Vista was no long in Auto-protect mode; Microsoft Outlook had locked up; and the shell explorer.exe has logging a consistent 95% processor time.  All of this was causing the video card heat sink fan to spin at high revolutions creating an annoying buzzing.  And oh yes the computer could not be shut down the conventional route; I had to physically power it down and then pack on again.  Once back on the computer acted normally for a few days whereupon the process repeated itself.  And so it had went until I finally tired of the crashes and over the last few day re-installed Windows XP Professional.

Now given the right set of circumstances (I have yet to parse out what those might be) Windows Vista Ultimate is a worthwhile OS.  The Aero interface is beautiful to behold and the bit-locker hard drive security feature is an idea whose time had come a few years ago.  But past this there is little to recommend any flavor of Windows Vista; in my experience with the OS, Windows XP does it far better!  Yes the sidebar is cool, but the same applet can be had from Google; it called the Google sidebar and it has far more gadgets, or widgets, than Vista's side bar.  Microsoft also made it hard to work with files; while the new Windows Explorer is cool to look at, it takes twice as long to actually work with the files.  File copy, move, delete, all take much longer to accomplish under Vista than they did under Windows XP.    

Over all Vista Ultimate is slower than the OS it replaced and far more unstable.  My PC is not the only one that experienced these pains; my wife's brand new PC, a Dell Dimension C580 with 2.0GB of RAM fails to run the OS with alacrity as well; she is always complaining about how slow the PC is in comparison to her old PC with Windows XP.  And a test PC I set up at work, a Dell Optiplex 520 with 2.0GB of RAM has Windows Vista Business installed and it crashes for no discernable reason from time-to-time just because.

Do I lament the passing of Windows Vista Ultimate on my home computer?  Not really.  Much of the functionality can be found elsewhere; freeware come to mind, or from Microsoft.  I already mentioned the Google Sidebar, however other programs that use the Aero interface can be run under Windows XP; e.g. Windows Media Player 11, Microsoft Office 2007, and Internet Explorer version 7.  And the bit-locker technology is licensed from Unimaco, and is commercially available.  It is far more important to me to have a functional computer than a pretty one that doesn't really work the way it's supposed to, or I need it to.