VistaJuice

First off let me apologize for a lot of comments not being displayed on the site. I set the spam filter Too High - and completely forgot to monitor the Junk Comments folder. This caused a bunch of the comments to be junked without me even knowing about. I went through and approved all of those so they are published now.

One did catch my eye and I think I should answer it in the post so everyone can read it and not just in the comments section. With this, we'll also begin a new trend on VistJuice - you can ask questions about things I did not cover in the blog, and I'll try to answer them. Please do keep it about Vista ;)

So, here we go:

Tim Hosey wrote in the comments on my "One month with Vista - my experience" post the following:

I like your review of vista. It is in-depth, but you're rather biased. A lot of what you say makes Vista sound "revolutionary" and new!

In reality, most of this stuff is just ripped entirely off of other companies. OS X is the biggest one, since it's their biggest competitor. Without jumping on a pedestal about what OS is best, I'll say that XP and OS X are both equally used by me. After spending about a week with Vista, I realized how God-awful it was. XP is much more stable (like when I put my computer to sleep, it won't glitch and shut down completely upon wakeup), and gives me very little driver incompatibility errors if any at all.

My biggest gripe about Vista is the fact that it uses so much RAM. This is an awful prospect for gaming, as the more RAM you have free, the faster your game loads. This just slashed my performance. Plus, most of the games were very unstable and crashed frequently, whereas in XP I had no problem. Vista has some glaring flaws that are almost unacceptable to the gaming community, and trust me, it's a huge part of Windows, like it or not.

In all, a lot of your high points were correct and valid, but I feel you were lacking a bit on the low points. Go give OS X or a good Linux distro a try if you've never done so. You'll regret upgrading to Vista and go to XP to do your gaming, and keep Linux or OS X for everything else. On that I can assure you.

My response:

First off, thank you for your comment. For the article you are referring to, it was OK for it to be biased in a way since after all it does reflect MY opinions and My experience of Vista after 1 month. Unlike this whole web site - that article had to be done that way. I did mention things I do not like as well as some bugs, it was not solely about how great Vista is.

Now, I do use Linux on daily basis as well OSX at times and love them both very much. I run PeconiHosting.com for years now and all of my servers are under CentOS Linux. It is a great system and I would not let any other OS run my servers. I'm quite familiar with it in both GUI as well as shell-based administration and have Ubuntu running under Virtual PC in Vista right now. OSX I do not have, since I do not own a Mac, but I do like it a lot. It is simple, uncluttered system and as soon as I have money I will get it so I can use it for Multimedia - my music, pictures, etc. Black iMac (the one coming out soon is what I am waiting for).

Saying that Vista ripped off OS X, or the other way around is just nonsense. They both steal from each other. Vista was in PUBLIC eye while still known as Longhorn for over 5 years now - and everyone (including Apple) could see the good and bad about it. The truth is Apple steals from Vista too (wait till Leopard comes out, you'll see) and then in the end Vista gets some other good points from OS X (could use more, but oh well).

The main thing is - THAT'S GOOD! If OSX could work on a PC - then it would be crazy what they are doing, but this way both PC and Mac fans can be happy by having cool things in both operating systems.

I am sad you had such a negative experience with Vista in the first place, but for me it's been a breeze. I have an older LG laptop and the one I am using right now (Sony Vaio), both of which are quite tricky thing for any new operating system to deal with - specifically because their hardware is not as in any other generic PC. None of these laptops gave me any issues, Vista is running smoothly on both and I never had to restart either one of them because of any kind of a bug, quirk, driver issue or Blue Screen of Death. As a matter of fact - I haven't seen BOD on Vista since the pre-beta 1 build which had issues with Nvidia's drivers! :)

I will agree with you on the RAM issue. Vista is Resource Hungry - and I expected that from a new more powerful OS. There are many hidden little things under Vista's hood which most people do not even know about - which run to make our life easier, application access faster, etc. I wrote about all of them in the previous posts on the site. Sure thing they require more RAM in order to run. If you give it some time, Vista will learn when you usually open up a game you like to play - and you will be amazed at how fast the game will be loading. It's thanks to the pre-fetcher - which will be able to anticipate when the game should be used so it will be loaded into the RAM before you even start it.

With this in mind - I come to a conclusion: the more you use Vista - the more it learns about you and your habits and the more optimized it becomes. At least this is in theory - but with my experience - after a month - it really does work to an extent. Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Counter Strike Source: all really RAM intensive apps - especially when opened TOGETHER - just snap when I click the shortcut key.

Try defragmenting the hard drive couple of times - I did it twice during the night while the computer was not in use - and this together with automatic defragmenting makes my computer breathe better.

I would like to know which games are giving you trouble since Counter Strike Source (the only game I play) works even better under Vista than it did in XP. I do use the driver provided by Microsoft since I do not trust Nvidia with the drivers yet.

I do agree with you that there are some more negative points about Vista experience but I am saving those for the 2nd month with Vista review. On the flipside - there are more cool things I like too.

Also, I'm a geek after all, and for me Vista really is a big deal. I would not say Revolutionary, since it really is not, but it is something that has A LOT of potential.

If I knew more about your computer specs, RAM, hard drives, free space, graphics card, maybe I'd be able to help you out to get the best out of Vista. Please let me know and thanks once again for your comment ;)

Cheers,

Petar