Windows Vista One Year Later

About a year ago, we(My Wife and I) bought our first license of Vista.  It came with a new laptop I bought for her.  I left it installed as I was curious and from what I had seen in the reviews, it was supposedly easily used by novice or average computer users.

At first, everything was neat and cute but I found it progressively frustrating and within about 2 months, my wife wanted it uninstalled and XP installed in its place.

The issues that caused the request were:

Old software that would not work on Vista

We have bought a fair amount of software for digital editing and scrapbooking/craft type activities.  Of all of the titles, one had no support and, unfortunately, was heavily used.  Ultimately, the issues have still not been resolved but a new version that has native support for Vista is about to come out.

Bad driver support

The performance of our Canon scanner was far from tolerable.  Unfortunately, this is still an issue but it does still scan.

Poor system performance

This was, by far, the biggest issue and the one that is the most documented out on the internet.  Vista before SP1 had major issues with hibernation, networking and several other issues.

The slow change back…

Shortly after Vista SP1 came out, I flipped my gaming PC to Vista and fully patched it up to SP1 and all other available patches.  I installed all of the latest drivers for my PC and then proceeded to install all of my games.  It has been a solid 5 months and I have not one complaint.  All my games work and any software otherwise, had updates to support Vista.

In mid August, I decided to roll the laptop back to the Vista license it came with.  After 2 months of use, it is a much better overall experience than when we first bought the laptop.

The funny thing is that there is more than enough nice in Vista to wipe out the other issues once the major performance issues were fixed.  Also, those other issues are not really the fault of Microsoft.  The software companies and the hardware companies all had ample time to deal with Vista but did not do so.  As much as Microsoft can be held responsible for disasters like Windows ME, Vista was not entirely their fault.

With more than 18 months on Vistas resume, there are fewer and fewer reasons to dislike it.  UAC is NOT annoying, performance is now fine, hardware and software support are much improved.  The only thing I see left as bad with Vista is the bum rap it is left with.