Vista Business edition does not come with the Aero glass, so that shouldn't be a problem for users with that edition. If they are using Ultimate or Enterprise, they can turn off Aero. Problem solved!

Hey Ben -- Vista Business Edition certainly does come with Aero Glass. We can send you a screen shot, if you'd like.

Jason

Yes, Vista is good if you have a computer with quad core and 4 gigs of ram. Everything takes years to load, and the computer constantly loads stuff(something to do with indexing feature). Comparing to XP, it hauls asz.

thanks for an unbiased review, unlike others i have seen...

you forgot to mention the integrated search feature, even if you do not remember where something is, you can just go to the start menu and start typing.

For example, instead of going to start menu->programs->etc....i just type php and press enter and the program i have designated to open php files opens up....you can even search your email from the start menu (if you use outlook or thunderbird)

and by the way, its (Windows key)+TAB, to get the flip 3-D, ALT-TAB is basically the same from XP

Dear Mr. Andrew,

If the essence of what you must do is e-mail, IM, word processing, and Web surfing... why don't you give a try to Linux?

People used to say that Linux was "difficult", but that's starting to change, with the surge of cheaper alternatives, such as Asus' Eee PC -- one of the bestselling laptops and Asus' most successful product EVER.

Eee is so simple that most people don't realise it's running Linux. It just works!

So, I'm suggesting to evaluate Linux from the "e-mail, IM, word processing, and Web surfing" point of view. Keeping that in mind, present us with a fair and balanced comparison with Vista!

Andrew,

On my machine Vista Ultimate takes ~700MB and Business ~500MB RAM after install (both have Aero enabled, as you said).
It probably depends on which applications you're running, but I sure can run more than 1-2 applications in 1GB of RAM without swapping, even with Ultimate.

BTW, in my experience Aero desktop manager (dwm.exe), turns itself off when the number of windows open (and the memory taken by dwm) is too big, giving back the memory for applications.
You can turn Aero off completely if you don't like it or need all its memory.

I have to agree with you that Flip3D is not very useful (although I'm not an Apple fan I like more their Expose); but I like the Aero glass look on applications, and I can afford to spend 30~50MB for effect.

Andrew, thanks for a review that is not driven by emotion.

I have been using Vista for 3 months and have no problem at all. My work computer has 2 GB of Ram and Vista Home Premium. My cheap home laptop has 1 GB and Vista Basic. I run two numerical simulation programs in the background and watch HDTV on it at the same time on the home laptop smoothly.

I think the Vista Home Basic is all I need. I do not see much benefit of Vista Premium.

god windows vista slow but at least we have a service pack coming.

god windows vista slow but at least we have a service pack coming.

i have no problem with Windows vista . i have windows vista ultimate and my memory is 446 MB on a Compaq presario computer so is no big deal all you windows vista haters and apple computer lovers go to hell because microsoft is the best of all OS..good luck to ya

The people complaining about how much RAM Vista uses are missing the point.

Why have 2 gigs of RAM if you are not going to use it.

Vista is designed on purpose to use more RAM. The architecture is such that if another program needs the resources then Vista will get out of the way.

Further with RAM so cheap, adding more is a no brainer way to improve the performance of your machine.

As for AERO, it does use more resources, however a decent graphics card mitigates a lot of this. Offloading the graphics card heavy lifting from the CPU to the GPU is smart.

I like lots of RAM primarily for VMWare workstation. I test a lot of voice products, so I am frequently running things like Asterisk in a VM. Since Vista is using so much RAM, there's less available for more client instances. Right now, I don't feel like I can run more than 1 or 2 instances at the same time.

I've been playing with the Vista's visual features a bit, and I've compromised by turning off the Sidebar. I was getting no value from the widgets, and seemed to take a surprising amount of resources to run.

Wow, you sure know how to bitch about stupid things...you are the reason people are misinformed and scared to upgrade.

"1GB of RAM, making slower computers swap memory with just one or two applications open."

How would you know, your test machine had 2GB. I have several machines with 1GB of memory and they all run fine with multiple applications open.

In your last comment post you said:

"I like lots of RAM primarily for VMWare workstation. I test a lot of voice products, so I am frequently running things like Asterisk in a VM. Since Vista is using so much RAM, there's less available for more client instances. Right now, I don't feel like I can run more than 1 or 2 instances at the same time."

Umm...2GB is not a lot of RAM for running virtual machines, and 2+ instances of a virtual machine will slow down most 2GB notebooks, it just boils down to physical hardware, not OS. Go buy yourself 4GB(~$100) and see what that does to your VM's.

Maybe you should find things you like about Vista and let people know about those, the more people upgrade to Vista, the more drivers, better optimized software, and general support from companies we users will actually get.

Thanks VM, for heaping more bad advice out there. Do you always recommend people with 32-bit operating system go waste money on RAM their system will never use?

Out of the box, XP uses less than 100 MB of RAM. I've successfully run 4 VMs simultaneously on an XP workstation with 2 GB of RAM (384 MB per VM), and it works fine as long as they don't all boot at the same time. No way I can do that with Vista.

Will someone explain to me why everyone else complains about Vista's "slowness," and yet I have not experienced it myself? I've been using Vista in its various beta and RTM forms since mid-2006, and I've moved over to using it on my main notebook and desktop machines. I've got a middle-of-the-road dual-core CPU in each, and I haven't scrimped on RAM, but these are not fire-breathing gamer boxes. My subjective opinion is that Vista boots faster than XP on identical hardware (each system can be dual-booted), and applications load faster than on XP. The few hiccups I've had aren't that different than the ones I experienced when I first used Windows XP back in 2001-2002.

As for Aero, and the seriously renovated UI that Vista presents, get over it. You can turn off that stuff if it offends you, or you can get Home Basic which doesn't even have Aero.

As I've used RTM versions of Vista more and more, I've gotten over some of my initial unfavorable opinions of Vista. Its hardware compatibility could be better, and its price could be lower, true. Overall, however, it's proven to be a worthwhile successor to XP. There's really no "Wow!" there, despite Microsoft's best efforts, but it's not Windows ME by a long shot. I suppose that sounds like faint praise, and maybe it is. However, I expect that most of us will be using Vista within a couple of years, so we may as well get comfortable with it sooner rather than later.

When installing printers in Vista, I have found that if you navigate to c:\windows\system32\drivers, right click on the folder, properties, security tab, and add your main user name as an administrator and give full control permissions to that user, you can install most printers in Vista. I have never had it fail yet.

I have WinVista on two PCS here, one a desktop and one a laptop. They both run very well and have no particular problems.

On the desktop, it runs slower than the laptop. I built the desktop back in late 2003 just for early builds of then the unnamed Longhorn desktop operating system. Aero wasn't even ready back then when I first did an install. In fact, just to get to the internet I had to create a startup cmd file that did some IP address routing. It was crude. Regardless, the PC had a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 that supported the hyper-processing technology that made the single CPU logically look like two processors. And I put 1Gb RAM in it and a video card in that had 256Mb RAM.

Then I got my $499 Everex laptop that came with a Dual Core 1.73GHz CPU and had Vista Home on it with 1Gb RAM and an integrated video card. It was slow out of the box. Why? Because Vista wants a full minimum 1Gb RAM to run all of the good stuff that I had turned on. Even though it came with 1Gb RAM, it didn't have access to 1Gb RAM because the darn integrated video stole at least 124Mb RAM for its own use. So, I added another stick of 1Gb RAM and the performance picked up dramatically.

I thought then that my desktop could benefit from the same RAM addition. So, I added another 1Gb RAM to the desktop. No apparent change at all.

My tests have determined that you should forget older non Dual Core CPUs and just assume Vista works best with a Dual Core CPU (sure Quad Core would be nice, too) because my tests bear that out.

One more thing: on my cheap 2Gb RAM laptop, I added a 4Gb fast memory stick to utilize the ReadyBoost feature in Vista. Although I was leary of the benefit, I determined it really does help. The slower 5400 RPM hard drives in a typical laptop need all the help they can get. A decent fast memory stick does help. My Windows Server 2008 box with two Western Digital Raptor drives doesn't need so much help from the ReadyBoost memory stick augmentation.

We are runnig several systems with Vista with out any of the problems I keep reading about. I was told by another sysadmin where I work that you could not get scanners to work with it; not even new ones. However, I hooked up a 6 yr old epson scanner and was up in less than 3 minutes.

The OS is supposed to be the environment, not the end product. I have run XP on a PII 400 MHz with 256 MB RAM. I wasn't doing cartwheels with joy, but it ran OK after I turned off a third of the (unneeded) services. My point is that the environment doesn't have to be so bloated and resource hungry. Vista needs much more resources than XP, and XP needs much more than 2000. Bigger is not better. Better is better. Can we please get something better, not just different and bigger? I can even live with a bit bigger, if it is truly better, but it is not, at least not significantly.
Most people will want Vista running with 2 GB ram and a very recent processor edition, plus a very powerful graphics chipset. Those system specs would run XP four times over, (maybe more if your needs are humble.) Are you getting 4 times the work done? Are you getting 4 times the joy out of using it? No, but you paid twice the price and need 4 times the hardware. Why? Because Microsoft said so. That ain't a good enough reason.
PCs are so much faster than they were 10 years ago. Why doesn't my experience in front of one seem any faster? Because software grows to waste hardware improvements. Just a few years ago 2 sticks of 256 MB ram was a big upgrade. Now a 256 MB stick is useless, (unless you have 8 memory slots, and we are lucky to have more than two in most systems these days.) I don't want to be required to have a 4 GHz PC with 4 gig ram and a 512 MB video card just to check my email, but that is where it is going. Please, stop this madness!

I've been running Vista on a new Dell since last August only because the new box came with it. I use XP at work but had not upgraded the home unit since the Windows 98 days. The only problems I've had with Vista are these:

1) Burning CD-RW discs is a headache. I really haven't conquered it at all yet.
2) Mating the unit with an HP Photosmart C5280 was an issue since the unit would constantly want to "rediscover" the printer and create new printer instances. After the wife yelled at me about 5 times I contacted HP and was told to shut down some service they(HP) had put on the system during driver installation.
Copying jpeg files to other media is problematic. I can't copy to flash drives. The files come over, the byte count looks correct, but I can't open the file.

All this from a "home" style operating system.