Windows Vista Review: The Messiah

What was once hailed by marketing hype as the greatest operating system of all time has proven to be one of the biggest headaches imaginable, having people praying for the option to downgrade to XP. Let's take a look at what went wrong with Vista. What's New To be honest, not much is new in Vista. There are only few surface changes like a search in the Start Menu and a shiny, glassy interface. Most changes were under the hood and therefore not visible to consumers, which was probably its first problem.

Hardware Requirements Hardware requirements were upped to the point where most of the machines on the market were made obsolete. The "Vista-ready" machines were sold were only the highest of the high-end systems. It seemed like a pretty drastic thing to do, trivializing the majority of your user's computers just because your operating system wants a new glassy effect. UAC The most popular annoyance of Vista is User Account Control and security in general. It is an attempt to solve all of XP's numerous security flaws by asking the user to confirm every time he or she does something on the computer. This would be great if better decisions were made as to what to prompt when, but they made just every administrative task a prompt, which became annoying too fast. In addition, security was so tight that is was possible for users to get locked out of their own files especially when copying files from hard drives.

In those scenarios, only advanced users would then know how to "take ownership" of their own files. Search Indexer Adding to the list of curious Vista features is the Search Indexer. By default, the Search indexer will index the majority of your drive. It does this too painfully slow to actually be useful. It doesn't even take advantage of the fact that it could faster when the computer is idle and slower when you're using it. Instead, it has one slow pace and it will eat up your CPU in the process. If you have a large number of files, the index never finishes. Search then brings up incomplete results constantly.

System Restore Vista uses System Restore this to keep backup copies of your system in case of a future system failure. What they don't mention is that System Restore is allowed to take up to 33% of your hard drive space. Yes, that is one third of your entire hard drive. If you have a 1TB drive, up to 333GB will be used for System Restore. So in effect, you end up buying 2/3 the hard size you actually bought. So as you can see, Vista was an average upgrade from Vista, but hyping it as the most revolutionary was a mistake. These big features that were advertised as the big changes in Vista also turned out to be its biggest problems. Let's hope they do better with Windows 7.