Back when I bought my Toshiba Satellite laptop, I was both excited and concerned about the ability to upgrade to Vista for an unbelievably low cost. At the time I figured I had enough of a challenge ahead of me just getting used to a new machine — removing all of the bloatware that manufacturers inevitably fob off on consumers, installing the programs that I can’t live without, tweaking it until it was just right. I decided to postpone my Vista upgrade for a time, then forgot all about it until receiving an email last month warning that the offer was about to expire.
So I bit. Sort of.
I bought the upgrade and decided to wait to try it out until I had a chunk of time to spend learning my way around my computer again. Having gone through that very experience back when XP replaced Win98 — which took me several days to get used to — I knew the chances were good that I’d be struggling with a new OS for days, which would quite possibly mean being offline for days, too. So this past Thanksgiving weekend, which I’d told myself I didn’t need to worry about blogging, seemed like a good time to take Vista out for a spin.
I hated it.
It took almost three hours to install, then slowed my laptop’s boot time to a crawl reminiscent of the old PS/2 days… the IBM version, not Sony’s. Meanwhile, my hard drive constantly churned thanks to the numerous unnecessary processes Vista insisted on loading. Then, although I found the Aero interface to be quite lovely, it drained my laptop’s battery so fast that I had to once again tether myself to an electrical outlet just to keep the machine going long enough to read all of my email. So Aero went, but that hardly solved all of the problems.
Vista refused to play nicely with many of the programs that I need on a day-to-day basis. Every time I tried fixing one of those problems another popped up. Eventually it became all too obvious that if I wanted to run Vista I’d have to change just about everything else that I like using, and naturally the changes would all cost money, too.
No thanks.
Yes, I probably could just switch to a Mac… but that would have a steep learning curve, too, in addition to a hefty price tag. I could switch to Linux, but again, I’d need a good chunk of time to learn an all-new OS but at this point I’m a bit reluctant to waste another long weekend as I did trying out Vista.
I’m back to XP, back to my comfort zone, and keeping my fingers crossed that I won’t be forced into using Vista anytime soon. Meanwhile, I’m waiting anxiously for the XP Service Pack 3 update, which is set for release next year. It’s said to speed up performance by 10%, which means that computers running XP will be twice as fast as those running Vista.
So why would anyone bother to switch to Vista, is what I’m wondering. I didn’t notice anything amazing about it, although the Aero interface was quite pretty. Then again, thanks to my friend Margi’s recommendation, I can get a pretty interface now on my XP machine using StarDock.
What, then, is the point of Vista?