Customer Reviews

Windows Vista Business with SP1 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I recently bought a Dell quad-core workstation, which had Windows Vista Business pre-installed. Apart from Internet Explorer, no program requiring internet access is working, including Opera, Firefox, CuteFTP, and Skype (all of which were working fine under Windows XP). I re-installed Windows Vista multiple times from the recovery DVD that came with the workstation, but it did not fix the problems. After about a month and 30 hours of wasted time, I upgraded to the Ultimate edition. Now everything is working fine, but my experience with Windows Vista Business has been very frustrating, time consuming, and expensive.

If it were possible to give Vista a negative rating I would do so. Vista is unlike every other Microsoft Operating System ever produced. Every new Microsoft Operating System came with its annoying little bugs. Those of us who liked Microsoft Windows myself among them usually got used to living with the MS bugs or "Features" as they are called by the company.

Vista was inflicted on PC users because somewhere Microsoft got the notion that a more complex difficult to use memory hogging buggy wizard filled operating system was more secure thus much better. Vista is indeed far more secure than any earlier Microsoft product for one basic reason it never lets you do anything. You can not be productive on Vista unless you jump through more operating system generated hoops than you will ever see during a lifetime at the circus.

Don't get me wrong. I am not one of these geeky guys that wants everyone to switch to Linux or Apple. I love my Microsoft Windows XP PC but, Microsoft Vista is a gigantic LEMMON no amount of Service Pack tweaking will ever fix. I have XP systems and I will be keeping my XP computer. If I buy a new computer with Pretty but way lame Vista pre-installed I will reformat my disk and install my trusty capable XP operating system workhorse.

To say Vista is super slow at start up, during regular use and at shut down is an understatement in its most profound incarnation. If you buy a system with so much memory, new graphics, sound and other high priced, hogh powered hardware producing a system that costs a kings ransom Vista will speed up a little. Vista is a money hog because many old XP devices do not work on Vista at all and others need lots of tweeking to get them to work. Now Vista is so improved it will never crash, naw Vista just freezes up so completely you can not do anything productive. Vista will make you more productive because all its freeze up's will have you doing the same work again and again and again and again hoping it won't freeze before you can save it!

Finally Vista is a big useless paranoid fat nag. I mean at every turn Vista wants to reformat, check or otherwise make sure something you are doing is allowed. Vista is the Fort Knox of Operating Systems but think about it who wants to live and work in Fort Knox. Vista is an operating system as such it is an extention of your home or business. Adding Vista to your computer is like stationing thousands of nagging police officers whose job it is to challenge your every move every time you become even the least bit productive. Vista is an operating system with so many paranoid subsystems built in that it is effectively useless for its intended productive purpose.

For all the reasons I list herein I would strongly advise against purchasing Vista. I feel Vista is the prettiest operating system Microsoft has ever produced. Unfortunately under that pretty VISTA surface is a code filled of maggots that grow into extremely pretty productivity killing computer bugs.

What a nightmare. If you've read the other reviews here, you probably already know how annoying Vista's access control messages are, and how it was incompatible with nearly everything, so I won't spend time railing about that. The one issue that I could not solve, or forgive, was one of the most fundamental issues for an operating system: file handling.

Vista didn't like copying files across a network. In fact, Vista took personal umbrage at being asked to transfer files across a network, and passive-agressively reduced the transfer rate down until it could be measured in bits per minute, instead of kB per second. I soon came to personify Vista as one of those toad-like elderly women behind the counter at the DMV who take perverse delight in watching people's impatience boil into homicidal rage. The kind of person/operating system that will let you get to almost the front of a two-hour line/95% complete file transfer and then wordlessly put up a "Next Window" sign/"File I/O error" message with just the hint of a malicious grin. The kind of person/operating system that justifies the "No Firearms in the DMV"/"Don't keep a hammer near your laptop with Vista installed on it" rule.

The problem wasn't just limited to network file copies, either. Copying photos from a USB flash drive to the hard drive took so long that I could have recreated them in MS Paint, pixel by pixel, more quickly and with less frustration. Where else but in Vista will you see a dialog box with the words "0.2 of 4 Mb copied, 240 hours remaining"?

My experience with Vista was so abominable that I swore never to give Microsoft another dime of my business, walked to the Apple store, and plunked down way to much money for a Macbook Pro. OSX has its issues, some of them serious, but OSX makes Vista look like Microsoft literally implemented the "1,000,000 monkeys with 1,000,000 copies of C++ will probably turn out a well-made operating system" rule, but decided to save money by giving about 200 monkeys 3 computers and one copy of Q-BASIC.

I was looking for a simple to use Windows interface to run Windows only programs like SAS (for statistics) and Microsoft Explorer, which for some reason, certain online sites require to display forms properly. This version of Windows fits the bill. I'm running it with no frills on the 32 GB partition (so I can read files when I am in the Mac environment). It does take up a good chunk of the drive, but I know Windows 7 would have never made it. Vista is familiar to those of us used to the older Windows 95/98/XP interface, and all of the software out there is still quite functional on Vista.

Nothing much to add. It's Vista Business and it works as I'd expect - which is fine.

After receiving Vista on my HP laptop and running it for 1.5 years now, I am throwing in the towel and leaving my PC because of the buggy OS. As an operating system, I expect functionality first, then design. Microsoft clearly got this one backward. I have had massive compatibility issues with many of my peripherals (scanners, printers, etc) since day 1 and still can't use 2 of my peripherals (they say drivers are still coming, but it's going on two years now). Running any Adobe product basically brings my machine (with 2G of RAM) to a crawl. I have had countless problems with the conflicts between Vista and the Office Suite - mainly Outlook and Word. I've actually had to run without anti-virus protection because that too brings the machine to a halt. Boot up and shut down time is at least 2-3 minutes and 2 minutes respectively. The automatic updates generally cause more problems than fixes. While not highly technical, I do understand testing and regression testing with the primary software and others. I am not convinced that Microsoft regression tests with its own products let alone non-MS products. I have thought about downgrading my machine to XP several times, but that seems counter-intuitive. The Mac ads on TV are so true. They're not even cute and funny to me anymore. I just resonate with the problem. Where is the fix MS?

I'll end this by saying that I love to adopt and experiment with new technologies. I was willing to play the Vista game knowing that while not as pretty of a UI, XP is significantly more stable and dependable. As I have been putting up with this pain from November of 07' and it is now September of 09' and bugs are still shutting me down (my mouse no longer works in MS Word and Microsoft says the problem is a conflict in the registry keys between Vista and Word (occurred as a result of one of THEIR updates), there is no fix), I cannot support this product. As Macs still do not support 3 pieces of software that I need (snagit (rumored to be coming soon), MS Visio, and MS Project) I will reluctantly still have to run some Windows OS on my Mac through Parallels Desktop. It will be XP only because I can trust it more.

Those considering upgrading, don't. Save yourself the frustration.

Vista is indeed a revolutionary OS. The user interface was a MAJOR improvement over XP. The Game Explorer is a very nice addition for gamers. And best of all, it doesn't crash! It's just stable.

I have used Vista Business since its release in January 2007 and it has been absolutely rock solid. It's fast (faster than XP even on systems with more than 4Gbs of RAM), much more secure than XP, compatible with older software, sexy Aero effects, and boasts loads of new features and improvements. And I already mentioned the much improved interface.

Yes, it does have a few bad things. UAC is one of them, but that can be easily turned off. Slow file transfer over the network was indeed a problem early on, but was fixed even before SP1 came out. And DRM is still just as bad as in XP.

Windows 7 is coming out in a few months, but it's not out now, so Vista still holds the crown as the best Windows version out there. Actually, Windows 7 is nothing but Vista SE with a new name. I ran the Windows 7 release candidate full time for a month, and realized that I had been running "Windows 7" since January 2007. Heh. I will still upgrade to Win7 though, if I find it for cheap (the current upgrade prices are NOT worth it if you already own Vista).

Overall, this OS has served me well over these past three years, and just felt compelled to write a positive review. Good job Microsoft! :)

Vista Business came with a Dell machine I bought. It is horrible -- slow, non-intuitive interface, seem to be hiding things (as compared to XP), etc. For me to upgrade to Windows 7 (hoping it would be an improvement for the horrible product they sold as an improvement to XP), Microsoft wants me to pay them $130. I am not going to pay $130 for it. My recommendation is to get a Mac. They work well (not perfectly, but better than Microsoft), and Apple is more responsive to their customers. The Apple Tax? Run the numbers on truly equivalent machines (all hardware, any apps you would buy, etc.)

...some readers will never be satisfied. Yes, some readers are eternal pessimists who cannot see anything good coming from Redmond. Yet, Microsoft spends more money on research and development (more than $5 billion annually) than virtually all tech companies combined. The company is not the world leader for the fun of it. I think it has earned it.
In my opinion, Windows Vista is the most stable of all the Windows versions ever---and I have a pretty good experience with Windows, starting with Windows 3.1. What's more, it is also very slick.
This product deserves nothing less than 5 smoking stars. Let all those who are dissatified stick to Linux redhat, if they dare!

I not only got what I wanted on time and the way it was described, but the vendor helped me with the initial decision to buy the product!