What if Windows Vista is forced on you?

Ok, so maybe forced is too strong a word. 

What if for instance, your CPU mount were to melt, taking the rest of your machine with it and leaving you with a choice of whether to install XP or Vista on your newly built machine (or of course, just to forget about the whole thing and buy an Apple instead)?

Since this is what happened to me Wednesday before last, I can provide a personal insight into this particular conundrum.

So if this happened nearly two weeks ago; why the hell am I posting this entry now?

Well, you see it’s like this…
Whilst there are a number of excellent reasons for moving to the Republic of Cyprus; cheap computer components and short delivery times are not amongst these.
As strange as it may seem, it was actually cheaper (and quicker) for me to order my components from Ebuyer, have them shipped to my father in law in the UK and then DHL-ed across to Cyprus at a cost of £92, than it would have been to buy them locally.

We’re not talking about outlandish hardware either, only an upper range Gigabyte mainboard (this turned out to be the ‘delay culprit’ at the Cypriot end), Athlon X2/5000 CPU, 4GB of RAM, a midrange G-Force card & a pair of 500GB hard disks.

In the end, the hardware wound up on my doorstep on Thursday, and I didn’t get a chance to build my new Gatesenstein until yesterday.

That said, once the thing was put together I was pondering what the hell to run it with.
I’ve had a copy of Vista Ultimate laying about since a couple of weeks after its release, but have previously felt somewhat reluctant to install it, since my XP installation was running perfectly.
In fact, this reluctance to upgrade to the new Windows operating system is something previously unknown to me in all the years since Windows 3.1.
As cool as Vista looked on paper, the large number of mixed reports in the run-up to and shortly after its release disinclined me to upgrade too quickly.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and all that.

Yesterday however, I found myself on ‘a hiding to nothing‘; newly assembled hardware, all work files and essential bits & pieces neatly backed up onto an external disk, a choice of operating systems and the weekend to get the job done.

‘What the hell… I may as well fire up Vista and see what all the fuss is about.’

And now, some 36 hours later, it’s my turn to slate the damn thing just as hard as I can.
Actually, no; as it happens I quite like the ‘damn thing’.

For starters there’s the fact that it installed without any issue whatsoever in what must be record time for any Windows operating system.
Then there’s the fact that it found everything it needed hardware-wise without causing chaos or needing six dozen driver disks.
I also find the interface to be quite intuitive. In other words, everything is where it should be without messing about too much; an aspect which was far from perfect with Win XP.
The boot-up time too, seemed to be far quicker than any Windows system I have previously used.
All in all, I was more than pleasantly surprised by my ‘user experience’.

Ah, but… I was using new (and much faster) hardware.
Surely Windows XP would also perform much better with this; wouldn’t it?

Putting the theory to the test, I took a pair of 320GB hard disks I had laying about, plumbed them in and proceded to install Windows XP.

So, after less than a day of using Vista, I had a go at installing and using XP, an operating system I’ve grown to know and love (well mostly) over the course of the past few years…
Aside from the fact that it was incapable of finding the SATA array without help, the installation itself seemed to take forever.
Then of course it needed separate drivers for pretty much every single component in the machine*.

The result of this particular user experience?
I found it to be a complete annoyance from start to finish; sorry, but there it is…
Even the boot-up time seemed positively glacial compared to Vista, something I hadn’t expected.

*Don’t start on me about bespoke drivers being better than generic Windows drivers. Once things are installed, most of us download the latest bespoke drivers anyway, so it’s pretty damn immaterial what driver-sets you start out with.

Plugging the Vista hard disks back in, I decided to find out what would happen if I halved the machine’s RAM.

Wouldn’t you know it, Vista still booted faster with 2GB of RAM than XP with 4; the same result applied with 1GB, although the cool fading effects weren’t quite as instantaneous at this stage.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not meant to be a ‘Windows Vista Whitewash’.
Vista is extremely resource-hungry and needs a decent spec system in order to run properly. 
Then of course there’s the fact that ‘User Account Control’ puts its oar in by default, halting the computer every time the user even looks at the screen; very tedious to say the least.

However, hardware is cheap these days and the User Account Control is designed to help the computer defend itself against inexperienced users*; it can be easily disabled by advanced users.

*As someone who used to do a lot of Windows support, I consider this to be a good thing.

So… all in all, Windows Vista gets the thumbs up.
If your machine can handle it, I would definitely suggest making the upgrade, so long as you’re willing to spend a little bit extra on one of the higher-end editions.

Still… one of the guys over at the Google Webmaster Help Group has suggested I run a:

<quote>Cross Platform, Multi-OS OS</quote>

involving both Windows and Linux. This should make for quite an entertaining little project, so keep an eye out for a post in the near future about it all going horribly wrong.

Food for thought?
Don’t just dismiss Vista, check it out for yourself.

Who knows, you may even like it.