Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (PC)

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Customer reviews

review by: pmtask date: 2008-07-19 rating:
Gets better the longer you use it.
I bought a dell inspiron 1520 laptop with vista premium pre-installed. At first it took an age to start up and I nearly thought about going back to XP!
But I started to notice something strange. Everytime I rebooted the PC it took less time than before. The cache system learns what you load and organises programs to start up quickly.
It now takes no longer to boot up than XP used to. Installing service pack 1 improved things further.

And after using it for 6 months I honestly think its very good. The interface is nice, performance is decent in games, applications load very quickly and NOT once in 6 months has the system rebooted, crashed, or frozen! Thats stability. With XP something crashed at least once a week. I've not even had the "this program has performed an ilegal operation and will be shut down message"!
I was even more impressed when I used my families XP based computers. Very new, quad core and dual core desktops but they were hanging/pausing, everything seemed to take that bit longer to do than in vista and I had to reboot one of them when all I could load was explorer!

All my drivers and products work flawlessly. I suspect that given this computer was designed for vista thats not suprising but my other peripherals all work well.

If you're not getting on with vista I suggest the following
1. Install vista service pack 1 (that does reduce hard disk access and make better use of memory)
2. Upgrade memory to 2GB. It may say you need 512MB but trust me, on a system with 1GB it is unbelievably slow! A friends laptop has this and its awful. Takes 3 minutes to load and about 20 seconds to load internet explorer! Mine has 2GB and takes about 1 minute to boot and 2 seconds to load internet explorer. Thats the difference memory makes!
3. Disable some of the services. I disable windows seach because I don't use it often and whilst it may result in super quick searches, the rest of the time the hard drives churning away indexing stuff. Slows things down.
4. Uprgrade all of your drivers to the latest version. Some of the drivers on your original discs will not work with vista but most manufactuers have drivers which support it now online.

Pro's - Looks sleeker, quicker to load applications/games, more stable, easy to use, side bar is great (I have weather/photo slideshow on mine), makes XP seem dated.

Con's - Needs at least 2GB of memory, does the same job as XP so is it worth paying money for upgrade if your XP system is working fine. Probably not for many though some will love the pro's.

Only upgrade if you have a decent PC (in particular 2GB memory).
I understand its not perfect for everyones uses/computer systems but I have to give it 5 stars because my experience has been flawless.

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review by: date: 2008-06-02 rating:
You'll be surprised.
You'll be surprised how horrible an OS can be. You'll be surprised of how little functionality you can find in this program. Simple tasks like connecting a camera became daunting tasks - demanding hours of research and running around forums to learn that there is no help to get.

I can think of no reason whatsoever to "upgrade" from Windows XP since Vista is as reliable as Windows 95 and as intuitive as quantum mechanics.

Trust me. Give Vista at LEAST a year or 2 to just become mildly functional.

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review by: date: 2008-05-31 rating:
Common misconceptions
I've had Vista running for about 6 months now. I've got a quad-core with 2Gb RAM, 500Gb HD and a Geforce9600, and I can honestly say that I've had very few problems with the OS as a whole.

Firstly, let's look at the new GUI. With any Windows release, the GUI is usually the first thing that anyone talks about. Whether this is a good thing or not is a seperate argument, but Vista comes out absolute trumps for me. The indexed searching from the start menu means I only ever actually look at my programs list once every few weeks. Everything else I want to run is just typed straight into the friendly box on the start menu to bring up exactly what I want. The GUI has had a few other tweaks. Aero looks fancy, with the most useful feature probably being the thumbnail previews of any programs that you hover over in the taskbar. On top of this there's a funky new Alt+tab style thing which you access with the Windows key+tab. You can scroll through the window previews with the mouse wheel, or the tab key, or just click on what you want. There are obviously things that people are not going to like, the Control Panel has undergone several significant changes, networking being the most obviously noticeable, but once you get used to the system, as with most things, it's not as bad as it looks, in some cases being more intuitive.

So coming nicely onto security, and the woes of the UAC. That thing that pops up lots of annoying dialogs asking you if you want to continue. It's not really that bad. If you want to do something to a protected directory, make sure you right click and use the administrator option. If you're doing something potentially dangerous, yes, it lets you know. It could still do with some work, but by-the-by it works. It's something that increases security in Windows, and that's always a good thing. In general, the firewall has been majorly improved as has Windows Defender (anti-spyware), and recently in tests, Vista, Leopard and Linux (not sure which variety) all survived to the same standards on their own, only falling prey once third party stuff was introduced (that means, using something that's not part of the OS to hack into it). There are still dangers to using Internet Explorer (dangers such as ActiveX), but this is not something to worry too deeply about, as it has less security holes than Safari (Apple's offering, this is well documented), but if you wanted to try something else, I'd suggest looking at Opera.

So I thought I'd have to say something about memory management, because everyone else has something to say about it. Vista will always appear to use high memory. This does not mean it is actually using that memory. Let me explain - when the computer is idle, and not using memory, you've got all that memory that's just going to waste. So what Vista does is it uses that memory to preload anything it thinks you will use. If something else needs that memory it can be freed very quickly, but if something that it expects to be run is run, everything is already loaded, leading to faster application startup times. Since Vista is using all this memory, you will constantly see upwards of 50% of RAM constantly in use. This is not a bad thing, it is a good feature, and something that actually helps your computer.

If you work from home at all, Remote Desktop has been vastly improved. It's the same interface, except for the password box, but it seems a lot snappier and responsive, and it's completely backwards compatible with XP.

I feel that I have to mention DirectX 10, just before I get to bugs. DirectX 10 is meant to be a huge change for 3D graphics for gaming, however it does not seem to have lived up to the hype. I can't really tell the difference, except in FPS (frames per second), although I'm going to have a look at the actual code behind it soon.

So, the bugs with Vista. There's three main problems with Vista - firstly, network file copying is stupidly slow for some people. As in, go make yourself a meal, take it to your mate's house and watch the football with a few beers, then head back and it might be done. This has been fixed slightly with Service Pack 1, although personally, I have not really experienced it badly, transferring files from an XP PC to a Vista PC. Secondly, zipping and unzipping are slower than they should be. I have every confidence that this will be fixed, but you can use tools like WinZip or WinRAR to unzip and zip files until it is. The third and worst problem for me are the Nvidia drivers, which have been bad for ages. In general, the most crashes are caused by third party software (that is, software that Microsoft is not responsible for), and while this seems like passing the buck, these companies have had more than enough time to get the work done, and there's no excuse for it, even if there was, it's nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft.

All in all I've been very pleased with Vista, even though it was a bit of a trial at first getting used to it. As far as whether you should get Vista or not, if you have an old PC (more than a year old), don't get it. If you're getting a brand new PC, might as well buy it from somebody without big corporate connections and install Vista yourself on it. Just make sure you get a well-specced machine (and that goes for graphics card as well), and things should be fine.

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review by: date: 2008-05-07 rating:
Not terrible
Well The Vista (start) menu is good once organised (takes about a week), I had to put it back to old version to organise it. The search tool works better than on a MAC and on XP as it automaticly selects the closest match to what you type in.
It also has the (clear) desktop as an option when switching between windows which is good.
I have to say 3D flip looks cool, wish it was on a Mac.

Not much else improved. I'moving back to my old desktop with my old friend XP so I can hopefully sell it and escape Bill Gate's worsening software and get a Macbook.


review by: Shaun date: 2008-03-26 rating:
Not sure, getting worried!
Bought a brand new top spec Dell. Had a dell for 7 years with XP, not one problem. Had this for about 2 months and gradually there seems to one problem after another.

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