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Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1 Upgrade Review (continued)
More User Submitted Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1 Upgrade Reviews
Date: 2008-10-16
Like being sadistically tortured
Windows Vista takes everything that has ever been fun under Windows XP and attempts to make it impossible. You liked being able to use multimedia under XP? Forget that!
The software vendors (RIAA and MPAA) have been screaming & suing the last eight years because canny computer users are pirating their products. Vista is Microsoft's way of throwing them a bone. It imposes crippling DRM all over your machine, degrades the viewing experience of HD video, and rats out the contents of your hard drive to the Mother Ship so that the RIAA and MPAA can spy on you and start sending you lawsuits if there's anything on your hard drive that might have been pirated.
Boot-up time is much, much slower, and the bloatware of this OS causes your hard drive light to come on and stay lit. I'm running this turkey on the latest dual-core machine with 2 gigs of RAM and a fast video card, and it still chokes and sits there like a dead rat, as it spins the hard drive and thinks about maybe responding to a mouse click. And then it pops up the security windows and asks if you think that you should be doing what you just tried to do. No information as to whether or not you've just clicked on an attachment that might be installing a Trojan or Keylogger. Just an annoying window that pops up that means you have to click an extra time.
Oh yeah - and here's another fun feature. If you buy into the hype that Windows actually is trying to make it easy for you to work with the wonderful world of multimedia, that is a BIG FAT LIE. Vista is designed to make it frustrating and impossible for you to 1) capture video (the system resource hog means many dropped frames and bombed-out sessions), 2) edit video (the DRM settings are so arcane and hidden that to turn on the setting that allows you to display full HD video in your editing program takes 4 (four) days of work on the Windows forums to figure out, 3) encode and compress video and most of all 4) upload and share video.
If you have any dreams or designs on being a multimedia content producer, Windows Vista is not for you. You cannot use this OS to do what you need to do to earn a living. It will not allow you to create video content. It will degrade the signal if you do manage to create the content so that the video that you see on the screen, and the video that you turn in to your clients are radically different. Your clients will ask you what happened, and you will not have a good answer.
If you travel, and try to work with clients in other countries, as I have, Windows Vista will try prevent you from logging on to the internet. You will come to know the Network and Sharing Center. It will be your new home. You will struggle and scream over all the settings you will have to know about there. Nothing will work. You will thrash and re-start and re-boot for hours. Imagine the fun! Finally, you will find out that some obscure security setting is at fault, one that is not documented in any appreciable way. And then, the next time you turn on your computer, you will have to go through this whole process all over again.
Date: 2008-10-15
works great
totally satisfied. received quickly. works great on my computer, it actually works better than window xp did.
Date: 2008-10-05
Pretty, but sluggish
Above all else, an OS should always be responsive to user input. When I click on multiple files and select delete, I don't want to see a "Preparing to delete." message. This is lazy programming on the part of Microsoft. When I right click a broken shortcut to delete it and the PC spends 30 to 40 seconds trying to find the link, this is ridiculous. On a regular basis my computer locks up for minutes while Vista is "thinking".
Maybe many PC users don't know any better and think this is the way computers work. I've used Apple, Linux, and Windows computers. None of them are perfect, other OS's usually do a better job than Vista. With Microsoft's large resources you would think they could put out something much better than this. All the time spent on "eye candy" would have been better spend on the back end making the OS more efficient.
If Vista looked the same as XP but ran faster and was more responsive, would users thought it was better? I don't know. I just know that PC's are much more powerful than they were just a few years ago, and Vista still manages to drag them into the mud. Faster PC's aren't a license for bad programming...
Date: 2008-10-04
It's vista... what else can i say
it does what its suppose to do, i did have one problem during ordering though. the website makes the product seem like it a full version of vista with the service pack 1 as the upgrade(even though they prominently showed a picture). luckily i wasn't at home when the product arrived and was able to order vista basic in order to use the upgrade. other than that slight problem, as i posted in the title... its vista. it could be better. I've been a windows user since win95 and even had a chance to dabble a bit with (blah) win3.1. when you look back at those OS's, MS has come a long way. OH and one more thing. If you are looking for the 64-bit versions of ANY of the vista software except for ultimate, you have to order the 64-bit DVD after you get the product. kind of an inconvenience since they make you pay for the shipping and i think for the DVD itself. after i learned that and saw how fast my comp ran with 4gb of ram (for some reason premium recognizes all 4gb while basic only sees 3.77gb) i decided to just hold on to the other 2x2gb sticks i have for safe keeping.
Date: 2008-09-30
Hardware? Be sure!
Overall, I am happy with Vista. Don't let the bad hype make you think twice about upgrading. All the programs I use have been running properly on it.
The issue I had with it was on installing it. You really do need at least a DVD rw optical drive. You can get the product from Microsoft on cds for another $10.75. Then when it's time to validate the install, you'll get a message to purchase another license. Don't worry, eventually their database will be updated so you can validate the product. I did not know this, and found the process to be very frustrating.
Upgrade? Definitely. But make sure you have upgraded your hardware first. Have at least 2 gigabytes of RAM as well. One gig will run it, but not well.
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