Why I Don’t Really Harp On Vista

In light of Microsoft’s $300 million dollar counterattack to Apple’s hilarious commercials, the Vista vs. OS X (vs. Linux) battle seems to be at an all time high. I have been thinking about this for a long time. And to tell the truth, I don’t think Vista is that bad. And I’m going to venture a guess that more than million college students nationwide agree with me. Here’s my reasoning:

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that of the 3 million annual high school graduates, about 2 million are enrolled in some sort of college the following October. (Source) Now say half of those students got a new laptop, divided into half Windows and half Macs. Vista was released in January 2007 and was widely distributed by the time the class of 2007 graduated in June. Half a million incoming freshmen and half a million sophomores with year-old laptops makes roughly a million students with Vista laptops; probably a conservative estimate. If these million students are like me, they probably find Vista is sufficient for what they do on their computers.

I bought my laptop in July 2007. It came with 2GB of RAM and a decent Core2Duo dual core processor. This makes it like the majority of laptops sold since then. After using Vista for a year, I have only reinstalled it once, but that was completely my fault (I was messing with Linux and accidentally deleted my Windows partition… oops). Vista doesn’t slow down with prolonged use as long as the user does a bit of tidying here and there.

Here are some things I rather like about Vista:

• Aesthetics: Vista just plain looks really nice. The Aero interface is beautiful. With 2 gigs of ram, Windows runs just as fast with Aero turned on. Vista’s interface makes XP look ugly and OS X look kind of boring. OS X looks decent but certain elements like the blue scroll bars definitely detract from its look. Vista is very polished and clean all around.

• Search functionality: Being able to search for a specific file or subfolder in any folder is a great feature. It has made me enormously more efficient. Even for running programs I don’t use often, I don’t even need to use the mouse. I just press the Windows button and type the beginning of the name of the program in and press Enter when it pops up.

• Wireless connectivity: Some people complain about this interface but I find it much easier to use than in XP. Just let your computer boot up and look for available networks then connect to whatever network you want. Easy.

I regularly simultaneously use Textpad, an FTP client, Photoshop, iTunes or Windows Media Player and Firefox with many tabs open and my system runs quickly and fluidly. I certainly don’t see why everyone complains about Vista being slow. If it isn’t slow doing all of those things, you’d have to really go out of your way to see it lag.

This is just my two cents on a heavily debated topic. I covered what I like about Vista, but it definitely isn’t perfect. What do you think of Vista? Do you like it? Tolerate it? Think it should be totally wiped off the face of the planet? If so, what do you use instead and why?