Vista reloaded

I had a really bad time with the initial release of Widows Vista that came preloaded on my Compaq laptop and consequently it was with some trepidation that I ditched old faithful XP and tried Vista once more after Service Pack 1 (SP1) came out.

I am glad that I took the plunge again though for Vista SP1 is a different beast altogether from the initial release. It is more stable, less annoying, there have been no reports of Vista SP1 flagging legitimate users as pirates...plus my laptop is running beautifully with it and has been for several months now.

If you are deploying Vista on existing or new machines the rule of thumb is don’t even think about it if you have less than a gig or two of RAM. Or more for that matter, Vista can actually use loads of memory to preload your frequently accessed programs to get them to run faster. Getting Vista to run in less than 2 GB configurations is simple. Just turn off Aero, by disabling the Desktop Window Manager Service, which will result in the glassy window borders, and the rest of the foo fah, disappearing and a corresponding speed boost. Reduce the number of apps that run at startup (use Startup Control Panel or the inbuilt Msconfigutility) for a further improvement. Often the problem is that the application running on top of Vista is a hog; usually you can find a lighter substitute.

A lot of the bad press Windows (not just Vista, any version) gets is on account of the flaky hardware underneath. The propensity to buy assembled machines is largely responsible for this. Every PC I bought before my current laptop suffered from the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). A memory diagnostic (MemTest86 or Windows Memory Diagnostic, a free tool from Microsoft) will tell you if there are any problems with the memory modules in your PC or laptop. There are such problems in most assembled PCs. Assemblers tend to lie that little errors do not matter but they do. These are the primary reason for mysterious system crashes that occur on assembled and, far less frequently, branded machines.

The other problem is with apps that don’t play well together. I had problems recently with Flashget (a free download tool) and Openoffice 2.41. The good news is that Vista’s Reliability and Performance Monitor lets you pinpoint and solve such problems (by uninstalling the conflicting app that you don’t need or just disabling it from starting every time the PC boots). This is something that you did painstakingly in XP and is a huge plus for Vista.

As is the case with every OS from the Microsoft stable, Vista’s specs are grossly understated. As per Microsoft’s site, Vista Basic’s Recommended Configuration is 512 MB RAM. If you are not planning to run any applications other than the OS itself, that’s fine. Otherwise, you need a gig or better. Similarly, for Home Premium/Business/Ultimate, the company recommends 1 GB of RAM. Again, double that would be just about OK. However, this was not the sole reason for all the bad press that Vista got. The first iteration of Vista lacked drivers for lots of hardware, broke applications that companies considered critical and ran poorly on hardware with a Vista sticker on it. The same was true with XP and PCs shipping with 128 MB of RAM, which crawled. XP needs 512 MB to flex its muscles. However, the first version of XP wasn’t such a radical revamp under the hood. Vista’s new device driver model meant that if your hardware provider failed to

provide an updated driver for Vista, you were out of luck. That’s changed, mostly, with SP1. In fact, the company delivered loads of driver updates over the past eighteen months that Vista’s been around and keeps doing so on a regular basis. Many of these drivers add features and capabilities that make Vista, among other things, an excellent platform for playing music.

The funny thing is that Vista uses all that extra memory for the right reasons. It caches your frequently used applications so that things speed up. Unfortunately, in all the Wow Starts Now, somebody forgot to communicate this essential fact.

Is Vista perfect? No, it most certainly is not but then no operating system is ever going to be perfect. Software is all about a moving target and user expectations keep on rising. For all the rubbish about users only using 20% of the features in a given piece of software, the unfortunate fact as Joel of Joel on Software pointed out once is that the 20% is different for each user. That’s the reason for the continuing popularity of Microsoft Office to take just one example.

So should you junk XP and jump onto the Vista bandwagon? You should but only if your hardware supports it. On older hardware, XP remains the better choice. Even many of the machines sold as Vista Ready aren’t really up to the job and would do better running XP. Of course, you could always spring for a memory upgrade, it is pretty cheap nowadays, and run Vista anyway. It does have a lot to offer once you install SP1 and do away with most of the nastiness that dogged the initial release. Give Vista another chance; it just might surprise you.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com