Review: Microsoft Vista Home Basic

About 3 months ago the motherboard on my computer system crashed and I looked around to replace it and I found that it would be cheaper to get a new tower then try and replace the motherboard, processor and memory. So I bought a new tower and it came with Microsoft Vista Home Basic.

When I hooked up the new computer and booted it up I was impressed with the speed at which the OS booted up. But that was about all I was impressed with. I had originally intended to use Vista to get my files from my hard drive that had my Windows XP on it. But when I installed my old drive and started moving my files to the new drive I found that there were so many security procedures to go through that even getting a few files moved over was taking a great deal of time.

Even logged in as an administrator the process of accessing files on Vista takes awhile. Also when you click on a program to run in most cases a popup will come up asking if you really want to run this program. So even running programs on Vista was time consuming.

So I had decided It was going to take me a while to transfer my files over so I was just going to use Vista in place of XP. So I started loading all of my programs from XP onto Vista. and there popped up another problem. A great many of my programs that I had running on XP either would not load into Vista at all or if they did they had to be run in administrative mode and even then they didn't function as they should. So I couldn't run a lot of my software on Vista.

Another issue with Vista was using my existing hardware. Vista didn't have drivers for some of my hardware so I had to go onto the net and search for compatible drivers before I could use my peripherals.

There is one feature that I did love in Vista and that was the speech recognition. I found it to be about 85 to 90% accurate and it can operate the entire OS unlike XP that only has speech recognition if the running program supports it and is not very accurate.

Something I found annoying about Vista was the widgets that come up on the desktop when you start. From me the just took up space on the desk top. After awhile I got tired of looking at them and I turned them off.

I can not recommend that you get Vista Home Basic as your main OS. It is just too time consuming to use and too limited in the software that you can run.