My mother decided she wanted a new laptop, and since she has always known Windows, she was determined to use it, even if it meant Vista. So, since I know more than her about laptops, I was in charge of setting up the one she chose.
Oh, how horrible it was.
My mother decided she wanted a new laptop, and since she has always known Windows, she was determined to use it, even if it meant Vista. So, since I know more than her about laptops, I was in charge of setting up the one she chose.
After accompanying her to Best Buy, she picked out a Gateway laptop for about $400 that ran Windows Vista Home Basic, equipped with 512 MB of RAM and 80 GB of hard drive space. It had a decent graphics card, nothing too fancy, but she's not a gamer or anything.
I bring the laptop home, plug it in, and it takes forever to start up. When it finally does, I am taken to the computer setup screen, which was relatively simple to use; better than XP's, in my opinion. There were a bunch of unnecessary graphics that flew around the screen while I waited. Maybe if Microsoft didn't waist all the memory on double-buffering to do this, the setup process would be faster. After this, the computer ?sets up the desktop? which took about 10 minutes, and then I waited another ten minutes for all the icons to show up on the desktop. Afterwards, I started the process of testing the wireless G network card that was built in. I have no complaints with the interface for doing this, but it took forever to connect! My XP laptop (that I'm writing this on) connects faster!
So I think it's just a cheap wireless card and move on to the process of uninstalling software my mom will not need. She wanted to know ?what a Napster? is, so I just decided she would never use it. Uninstalling each program must have taken three minutes each! The big ones took about seven. This is ridiculous, for removing software! Why is it so slow?
So I move on to downloading new software off the internet. Since everybody knows Firefox is the supreme web browser, (it kicks Internet Explorer's ASCII) I started there. I head on over to firefox.com and wait a minute for the page to load, then five more to actually download the setup file. Then I wait six minutes to install the software. I couldn't even install OpenOffice, the card kept disconnecting. I accomplished the installation through a wired connection, which was still slow, but a bit faster. (Oh, and OpenOffice took about ten minutes or more to install. I walked away.)
The speed of all the processes were ridiculous. Also, I guess they tried to make the Windows program manager more like a Linux package manager? It's kinda annoying. I can't really describe it, you have to use it and compare it to Linux to know what I mean.
But there is a link to ?manage startup processes?, which I immediately went to. All programs must be closed before they can be removed from startup? If I'm not mistaken, it wasn't like this with XP! So I had to uninstall Napster, Gateway Games, and everything else first.
But my mom is still content with her new laptop. She doesn't need an ?inter-web, with those online video game machines!?
In conclusion, the experience I just had with Windows Vista has lowered my opinion of Microsoft by 50%. My laptop runs XP and has 512 MB, and it's really fast! Vista's minimum is supposed to be 1 GB, but it should still run at least decently at half of that! But no, it doesn't. Microsoft, you have disappointed me.
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Windows Xp is still a vital part of todays businesses.
I use a POS (point of sale) software rogram for my business, the software does not support VISTA! My wife works from home for a major company and they only support Windows XP. We have to purchase another computer from Dell, and we found that they still offer XP on there computers. The only problem is you have to do a little research on the web site to find a good deal. Well I wish I could use Vista, but at this time it would not be any use for me.
http://www.twincities.com/ci_7030265?source=most_emailed&nclick_check=1#recent_comm
Vista was designed to run on multi-core processors. It shouldn't be a huge shock that a $400 Pentium 4 didn't run Vista efficiently. I also ran Vista Home Basic on a 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 with a gig of ram and got the same result. The difference is that I wasn't shocked that it didn't run well. I knew the specs going in. Do your mom a favor and go find Windows XP Pro on eBay.
I set up a new laptop for my wife. The Compaq equivalent of the Gateway you mentioned. We were replacing her old Dell CPx machine with a 750MHz P3 and 512MB of RAM running XP Home. After I uninstalled all the crapware that came on the machine and set up her WiFi connection, her first comment was "why is slower than my old machine?" I added another GB of RAM and it finally performs on par with the old laptop.
The real problem here is, that with seven versions of the OS, they don't have one that runs on entry-hardware. Frankly, they shouldn't ship a computer with Vista if it won't run it.