Two years ago, I wrote “A year with Windows Vista” about my experience with the much-maligned operating system. Now it has been three years. The $650 Toshiba laptop has been bumped along dusty African roads, has been dropped, has been vibrated on multiple cross-country helicopter trips, and has survived a fair amount of food and drink spillage. There have been no hardware failures, no system crashes, and no software incompatibilities. I like the fact that the machine is now worth only $100 or $200. I have no qualms about leaving it in a semi-public conference room and stepping out for lunch.
10 thoughts on “Three years with Windows Vista”
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It annoys me that my wife’s Toshiba laptop, which I gave her for Mother’s Day this year, scores an almost identical performance index in Windows 7 than my work-issued Dell latitude. Why? Because I paid $500 for hers, and my company paid over $1500 for mine (before adding things like port replicators, stands, warranty and insurance, which pushed it to over $2200). Hardware-wise, the only advantage of the Dell is that port replicator and its integrated platform/lift/stand. A friend and my brother both own Toshibas nearly identical to my wife’s $500 wonder, and theirs also run rock solid.
My company expects 3 years of use from these Dells, but at $500 a pop for these Toshibas almost pay for themselves within the first year.
So, how did the three years with Vista go then? Aside from telling us your laptop is excellent, what about Vista? you did not have system crashes and incompatibilities, any more comments?
Federico: What else can one say about an operating system other than that it didn’t crash and ran all of the applications that were required/desired? My purpose in turning a computer on is never to run the OS; I’m only interested in the apps. Windows Vista did not get in my way as far as I could tell. It is possible that some innovative operating system, such as Google Chrome, would be a little zippier on the same hardware, but mostly I’m confused as to why people threw so many rocks at Vista.
As for the laptop itself? I still don’t like the keyboard, but I can’t blame Vista for that. I would choose a Lenovo for next time due to their superior keyboards (the IBM legacy).
I think the issue with vista was that it outstripped a LOT of the hardware it was sold with. About 3.5 years ago, I bought the cheapest Pavilion I could buy from HP during the Christmas season. Three hundred Dollars.
It came with Vista Home Neutered Edition, and for the first 24 hours or so, it was a pig. That was vista’s problem. The VERY first experience you had with it, it was frantically busy registering, configuring, organizing the hard disk, and generally contemplating it’s navel. Not doing the things you JUST paid a lot of money for it to do.
It was also used in a computer with 1 Gb of RAM, and it wasn’t in any way OPTIMIZED for that footprint (as can be seen with Windows 7 and a netbook, you can run damnear the exact same OS, because Windows 7 and Vista are VERY similar under the covers.)
Give Vista enough footprint to work with and I’ve got no doubt it’s a perfectly fine OS. But Windows 7 is quite a bit better.
Philip, if someone took your now-cheap laptop, wouldn’t you worry about the data you have on it?
Glad to hear people saying good stuff about Microsoft.
Tim: I don’t keep important data on the laptop’s hard drive. If the laptop were stolen, I would change my Gmail/Gdoc/Getc. password.
I also used Vista for about the same length of time, on both a laptop and desktop. I basically had no issues to speak of. I did demos of our .Net based software using it during this period. Some of my top developers did their .Net development on Vista. People love to bash products, what can you say?
I’ve had a Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC at home with NO problems at all (for 3 years now). The hardware is pretty powerful though (Quad Core processors with 4Gig RAM) so it can adequately supply the required resources from the “hungry” operating system. Once you manage the “resources” issue, Vista is a solid and secure operating system in my opinion. The other great option I would recommend is using Ubunty Linux (which I have on my old laptop). Runs like charm, very stable and secure.
If you are leaving it unattended, shouldn’t your biggest worry be someone tampering with your laptop and installing a keylogger (or similar)?
I used Vista a bit, but I have been using Windows 7 for 2 years now (since beta) with no problem at all (even when it was in beta). My hardware? Original Dell Inspiron 5150 which is Pentium 4 @3GHz, 2MB, 250GB HD (the HD is the only component I upgraded). I love it over Windows XP (which is what we still use at work) and it performers very well with my 7 years old Dell 5150 laptop; yes I develop on this machine using Visual Studio 2005 and Eclipse 4.