Hey, I just realised something. Why do people hate Vista so much? I think I’ve figured out why.

It has had a bad image from the start. I mean sure, there were some problems related to performance which were pretty much fixed through updates, hotfixes and SP1, but from what opinions I’ve heard from numerous people, it doesn’t seem to have swayed the general view on Vista. Most of these opinions are extremely critical. I have to double check to make sure they really are talking about Windows Vista. (Okay, I had issues with it too at first, but I’m now over getting a PC game made in 2001 to work on Vista. I have two desktops at hand with XP Pro, SP3 installed.) Apart from a little software incompatibility – which is easily remedied thanks to the Internet, and issues about the performance requirements of the new O/S, (I like a very small memory footprint) I’ve had no problems whatsoever with Vista.

I’ve come to accept the fact that the hardware nowadays is well able to handle a measly thing like Vista. It’s just where I’m used to seeing a page file of 100 to 140 megabytes on start-up, I now see it climb over 1000 megabytes with little prodding. This is not affecting the performance on my laptop – hooray for RAM – just my mental state. You should read my previous entry to get an idea how much I care about memory footprints. With the aforementioned software incompatibility – again, this is to be expected. We must remember that Vista is not Windows XP, where XP is basically a beefed up Windows 2000. It’s a completely new system.

Aside from those hiccups – where I again feel the need to mention that they are entirely normal and to be expected – I have had absolutely no problems with Windows Vista. Everything I’ve done to it, whether it be installing it, networking it to another PC, a slice of gaming (MAME yay!) and just general computery stuff, etcetera – works like a charm. It really does. And in some cases, it works where XP doesn’t. So there!

After looking back on all this, why do people seem to hate it so much? The answer is simple. It has become the operating system which people love to hate. You know those self proclaimed power users who consider themselves a bit of a dab hand at computing – I reckon they just jump on the bandwagon and abuse Vista on online forums (while using Vista of course). Not to mention everyone else who has gotten swept up in all this. I honestly haven’t seen this much crap hurled at an operating system since Windows ME – and you gotta admit, that ‘un was at least justified in its reviews.

Up until Windows XP, we had a plethora of regular releases of operating systems and people were used to that. Now there’s a break of five years where people used XP the whole time. Then Vista popped up. I think people had far too high expectations of Vista (yes, Microsoft loved to talk about it) and were waiting for something to sweep everything else away. That’s never ever going to happen by the way!

Also when it was being developed, you’d get the occasional announcement that special features that were promised in the release were dropped. People weren’t happy about it. This went on for quite a while and by the time Vista was released… whoops. People were already ready to hate it. They wanted blood. And like all new operating systems, it had a few niggles, performance issues and wasn’t fully supported by hardware vendors and wasn’t a better experience than Windows XP in every way imaginable… yeah, it wasn’t a pretty spectacle once reviewers ripped it apart.

But hey, it seems to have stabilised quite a bit. People are buying it. Sales are good. Positive reviews from people who know what they’re talking about. Yeah, I reckon things are turning around. C’mon, give Vista a fair go. Don’t believe in all the negative hype. It’s a fact – some people will always hate Microsoft, no matter what you say.

Tags: IT, O/S, windows

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Dane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.