windows vista vs. xp posted in windows, oct 15, 2008

general consensus seems to be that vista is a worse version of windows than xp, but that’s not been my experience at all.  so i have to wonder what is different about what i’m doing in vista compared to what most people are doing that makes it the best choice of windows for me but not for anybody else.  here are my best guesses about what might set me apart:

i build my own systems.  this means i “install” vista myself and don’t add crappy extra software that comes with pre-built systems with windows preinstalled.  that’s also true with xp though so doesn’t explain why that would make more of a difference with vista than it does with xp.  so if this factor actually does make a difference, it would mean that vista isn’t as good at dealing with the problems that come from having crappy extra software as xp was.  i’m not sure how relevant such a problem actually should be, but the fact remains that people who aren’t comfortable building their own systems have little choice but to buy a system bloated with crappy extra software.

i also turn of user account control (uac) — that annoying vista popup that comes up all to often to ask you to confirm that you wanted to do that thing you just tried to do.  maybe microsoft testers found it just as annoying as i do and turned it off, which makes it hard for them to find any bugs in it if they have it turned off.  or maybe there’s nothing about it making vista less stable and it just makes people like vista less because it feels annoying and useless.  i’ve never heard of it popping up for anything other than what the user was actually trying to do, which i assume is the point:  to let the user cancel the actions of programs that are trying to damage their system.

i don’t use windows media player, windows mail, windows messenger, windows calendar, etc.  if i knew nothing about microsoft i wouldn’t expect that programs included with windows could actually cause problems for windows itself, but from using microsoft office it appears that the people who work on that don’t talk to the people who work on windows itself very much.  again these programs are included with vista so i could see that if people don’t like something about these programs they would say they don’t like vista.  of course if you compare to xp, there was media player, mail (called outlook express), and messenger back then too, so this seems unlikely to make much difference.

my hardware is pretty decent.  i score 5.3 on the new windows experience index, which is brought down by my hard drive as everything else is 5.8 or 5.9.  that would make me think windows vista should be expected to work reasonably well on my hardware.  it doesn’t explain what’s considered a good score — all i could find that referenced this number was in the new games explorer, some games list a required and recommended score.  every new version of windows has required more powerful hardware than the previous version, so this isn’t really anything new if a machine that is nearly as old as xp isn’t very good at running vista.

all my hardware has vista drivers.  i remember when i went from 98 to xp i had an off brand scanner that worked fine in 98 but didn’t work in xp, so i was dual-booting 98 and xp until i got a new scanner that had xp drivers.  i realize most people don’t know how to and wouldn’t be interested in setting up dual boot with xp and vista, and would prefer to just stick with xp if that’s where a certain piece of hardware works.

the last two points are both problems that seem to come up with every major release of windows.  i think the gap between xp and vista release dates was the longest so far, so maybe people forgot about or never experienced those things from when xp came out.  that hardly seems to warrant the amount of hatred vista seems to have generated though, so maybe there’s something else.  i don’t see what exactly it is people have against vista — it almost seems that people think that by badmouthing vista they will appear smarter or cooler and they have nothing against vista from their personal experience but are just saying it’s awful because it seems like the thing to do.

i don’t mean to say that vista is by any means the perfect operating system, just that compared to other versions of windows it does just as well for me in most areas and better in some areas.  there are still plenty of things i don’t like about windows in general, and if people were saying vista was awful and instead running linux, bsd, or osx they’d certainly have a point.  most of what i hear about though is people saying vista is awful and instead running xp, which still has the problem that it’s windows.

so is vista really a worse release of windows than xp?  if you think it is and have a specific experience that makes you feel that way i’d like to hear it — please post a comment here.