Posted on 24 Nov 2008 by Stuart

What is Vista?
Vista is Microsoft’s newest Operating System which is intended to eventually replace Windows XP. If you already have XP, you may be wondering what the big fuss is. Work began on the new Vista Operating System back in May 2001, five months before Windows XP was released. In August 2004, Microsoft scrapped the work they had done on Vista, and started afresh.

Microsoft finally announced the completion of Vista in November 2006, and retailers began a massive advertising campaign for this all-singing all-dancing piece of software.

The Market.
When Vista hit the shelves, retailers were expecting a much higher number of copies sold. In Vista’s first month, a staggering 20 million copies were sold, double the amount of XP sales in its first month.

DSG international (the owners of PC World, Dixons, Currys, and Currys Digital) have blamed their fall from the FTSE 100 on the poor sales that Vista has failed to provide.

Should I upgrade?
If you’re using Windows XP at the moment, we suggest you stick with it for the time being. Many people have already taken the plunge into Vista and have regretted it.

Vista still lacks driver support for common pieces of hardware. What this means is that sometimes simple devices like your sound-card, or your printer, will not yet be compatible with Windows Vista. This however is not just Microsoft’s fault. The hardware manufacturers are also partly to blame for not releasing compatible software drivers for this new and long-awaited Operating System.

In March 2007, Vista users experienced a bug in their Vista computers which stalled their machines when deleting, copying or moving files. In December 2007, TheRegister.co.uk (a renowned news website that specialises in technology) reported that these problems still exist within Vista:

"It's been almost nine months since we first reported on Windows Vista's inability to copy, delete and move files without stalling indefinitely, and yet the problem continues.
Screenshots relayed this week by two Reg readers say it better than we ever could. ‘48167 Days and 23 hours remaining,’ one of them reads. ‘36843 Days and 0 hours remaining,’ states the other. Both are Vista's best-faith guesses as to how long it will take to copy data from one location to another."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/20/more_vista_copying_problems/

There must be a good side?
You are perfectly correct if you think that! There must be!
We took a look at Vista and found it to be very pleasing to the eye. The new feature Microsoft call “Aero” allows the user to see extra visual clues, new glass effects, and sharper/faster movie action.
But if you want all that, you need to shell out for the more expensive editions of Vista – and you need a very fast computer to run it!

So which one is faster? Vista or XP?
We’ve heard people scream from the hills that their Vista computer is much faster than XP. Putting aside Vista’s unique feature to constantly ask you if the operation you attempted was intentional, we’ve had a look online for some ‘benchmarking’ test results.
A website called TomsHardware.com has done a fantastic job of testing both operating systems in an almost identical environment. Unfortunately though, when they were testing the Vista operating system, they intentionally turned off the ‘Aero’ feature – saving computer memory and speeding up Vista dramatically.

The above example (taken from TomsHardware.com) shows the two Operating Systems compressing a file. Obviously, the less time the better. Vista shows a poor result in this test letting XP take the lead. Not all of the test results on TomsHardware.com are as clear cut as this, but most of them show which Operating System has the better overall performance.

If you want to take a look at the website, and the full test results, just click on this link:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/