Microsoft Windows Vista Review

Microsoft's newest operating system (aside from the Windows7 beta released recently) Vista, has gotten the worst rap of an operating system. Well, that's if you don't count the notorious XP when it first came out, especially the SP2 release. And now everybody wants to go back to XP and no one will touch Vista.

There are several arguments against Vista. The one I hear the most is how much of a system drain it is. While this is arguably true, it may not be as bad as you think. If you disable all of the graphics effects it runs well on only 512 mb's of ram. And for those who have upwards of 2 gig's of ram and see all of it being used for the Operating System, there's a reason for that. Vista purposely uses all your ram so that loading new programs into it is faster. For example, if you have 2 gig's of ram, and you are running XP, with nothing else running it will probably only use 256 to 512 mb's of your ram. But when you're running just Vista alone you will see that almost all your ram is used. Rather than think of ram as a storage space, think of it as a cache. Empty cache space is wasted cache space. It's expensive, but empty memory using your power for nothing. Vista uses a system called SuperFetch. When you are not using your ram, it will retrieve the data you use the most and store it in the ram so that it is readily available for you when you with to access it.

The downside to this is when running high resource programs, SuperFetch will still fill the left over space, which means your computer is reading off the hard drive which will slow down your applications.

You can disable SuperFetch by typing services.msc into the Start menu search or run boxes, then double-click on Superfetch in the list to open up the properties, and then change the drop-down to "Disabled". You can also click Stop to immediately turn it off. (courtesy of the How-to-Geek)

All in all, I think once Microsoft releases Windows7 most people will be much happier as it is supposed to be fully backwards compatible with XP and much better optimized.