Review: Windows XP [the advantages of upgrading]

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.

Windows XP has quite a cartoony look and feel compared to the slick look of Aero Glass, this is mostly offset by the lack of strange screen artifacts caused by malfunctioning graphics code. You know, almost like static on the screen. This was a once or twice monthly occurance on my laptop, and happened on my desktop whenever I logged in, and also whenever I played a 3D game after leaving Vista running for a couple of hours. I also miss the "orphaned windows" I got on Vista, dialog boxes that would not go away, in a sense they became part of the desktop, since you could drag a selection from within them, despite the fact that the Glass would render the selection below them. Such crazy graphics bugs appear to be a thing of the past.

Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some "I'm still starting up the OS" queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once. In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to <gasp> Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP. With the amount of multi-core processors around today using a multitasking operating system like XP makes a world of difference.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codecs pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.

Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you're surfing, a nice touch.

XP comes with some impressive device support. In fact, every peripheral I've collected over the years works perfectly with it. Many have the device drivers preinstalled on XP, making their installation a snap, but for the rest it was easy to find device drivers on the Web. In addition I found the drivers quick and reliable, a far cry from the buggy, slow and sparse driver support in Vista. I'm glad to see that with their new flagship OS, Windows XP, Microsoft have finally learnt from the mistakes they made with the Vista launch. In addition, support for mobile devices seems to be significantly improved.

I've also found that XP seems much lighter on the hardware than Vista, when it's inactive the hard drive very rarely spins up, a major advantage for me, since I often sleep near my laptop. No longer do I have to try and ignore the continual hard drive drone, but can now sleep soundly just like my computer. I never did figure out exactly what Vista was doing with my hard drive the whole time, but I'm sure it degraded its lifespan with all that spinning.

All I can say is "wow!". You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

Internet Explorer 7 is much more reliable on XP as well, and has so far not crashed once whilst viewing GMail, when it used to do this several times a day. In addition, I can now actually close the thing down normally every time, instead of sometimes having to kill the process. Error collection seems to be far better as well. Instead of a dialog taking a minute or two to collect the information it needs, the dialog comes up and is ready to send error data almost immediately. I am sad to see the back of the Solutions tool though, it may have hardly ever delivered any valid solutions, especially for the standard random crashes, but at least you knew that something under your control was tracking that information. Please, Microsoft bring it back.

Speaking of which, I notice that the Reliability Report is also gone, again a sore loss, I really enjoyed charting the downward spiral of my Vista reliability, there were those occasional humps that got you all excited, and then the graph would continue its steady sojourn downwards. Of course, the fact that it only appeared to pay attention to a tiny fraction of the actual problems was a bit of an issue, but I'm sure they could have resolved that for the XP release. Ah well.

I also am pleased to note that Ctrl-Alt-Del does actually have an effect nowdays. Many times in Vista, I wished that they would make this more reliable so I could kill off the inevitable hanging Windows Explorer process (as a matter of fact, this is the situation I find myself in right now), in XP it actually does something as opposed to being part of the usual Vista eternal hang. Speaking of which, please excuse me for a few minutes, Windows Explorer has now been 100% hung for 5 minutes, despite my asking Vista to restart it, and despite me pushing Ctrl-Alt-Del several times over those 5 minutes. So I'm going to have to hard-reset my laptop. This process, by the way, is also something that amazingly seems to almost never be required in the clean and sparkling new XP.

Right, I'm back, thanks for being patient. I mentioned how much quicker you could start using programs from a boot in XP, I must admit that, appealing though that feature is, you won't actually find it that useful. XP almost never appears to require a reboot, so you hardly ever take advantage of a wonderful improvement like that, which otherwise would save you at least 15-20 minutes a day.

This is another area where Microsoft have really excelled in Windows XP. Games are significantly more responsive, get much higher frame rates, and are far more reliable than in Vista. If you're a gamer, the upgrade to XP is mandatory. Whilst there are a few games that won't work as well in XP than in Vista, you'll find that on the whole XP supports almost all the games you'd want to play. In addition, it's vastly increased reliability means you'll spend much more time killing things than restarting, a welcome change I can assure you. You'll also find that non-XFi soundcards with EAX are much improved by their support in XP, which can really add a bit of excitement to your gaming experience.

Multimedia support on XP is vastly better than on Vista. Whilst content-creators had insisted on all sorts of intrusive features in Vista that made the multimedia experience a living hell for Microsoft users, thankfully with XP Microsoft were able to insist that their customers needs came ahead of the content creators outdated business model. It's nice to see a corporation like Microsoft stand up to the cyber bullies at the MPAA and refuse to assume that its loyal customers are criminals. In any case, the DRM built into Vista was broken shortly after it's release anyway.

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft have really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

the only area where vista is superior to xp is the quality of audio, if PC is used as music server. Vista bypases dreaded k-mixer.

OTOH, your network bandwidth will be arbitrarily throttled if you play back any media on Vista.

"Hey, the design of our network and media systems means that playback might be choppy during network use. I know, instead of fixing those systems, we'll just throttle the network enough that it will never interfere with playback."

We heard the same whines when XP was first released. “98 is faster! XP sucks!”

2000 rocked in comparison to 98. There was no comparison -- security, stability, file system, all unarguably superior, not to mention SMP support. I used to have to reboot 98 four or five times a day in heavy use, not so with 2000.

We did have to wait for XP SP1 until it was better than 2000 (unless you use wireless, then you needed SP2). OTOH, Vista had years more development and testing than XP, and its SP1 has already taken longer than XP's SP1. Not favorable to Vista.

I am also a Windows developer. Truthfully, it’s hard to establish Vista’s superiority until it’s been tried and it hasn’t yet gotten the same market penetration to make it a tried and true performer. All the other minority platforms like Apple and the hundreds of Unix/Linux distros suffer the same lack-of-challenge and so they look good but they’re not subject to the same level of attacks as XP currently is. However, I am aware of many of the security improvements made in Vista, especially Vista64 and they are very significant.

I must disagree with your contention that you can provide security without a performance hit. It’s a fact that all virus software impacts performance. Security must be considered at many levels and at some level, particularly buffer overruns, you can have improvements without performance hits. But that is just no true overall.

One of the problems I had that exhausted my patience was a CAD program that I have used for two years with XP Media Center. It is by a company that is no longer in business. I have the product key to the program and previously when I upgraded my computer that also ran XP I was able to reinstall it and it worked fine.

However, when I attempt to install this program onto my new computer using Vista it goes through the install process, asks for the key and nearly completes installation before it flashes a message ‘Unable to copy ickernel.dll’. I went through the HP warranty support people and they couldn’t do a thing except waste my time. They finally shunted me over to Microsoft who opened a case went through all kinds of unnecessary checks, had me attempt reinstallation several times and then of course tried to get me to go to the CAD company or a find a third party service. They offered to bump me to a premium service that would cost me. So my choices were to continue the frustration with Vista, buy a new CAD program costing thousands of dollars or get rid of Vista and install XP.

Other problems are that HP has their own partition and seems to want to control what I do on my computer. I asked the seller if I could get rid of the HP crap but he said deleting their partition would cause Vista to malfunction. I said HP is making me angry and they said all the major brands are doing the same with Vista.

Then there is all the Security hangups. Everytime I want to do something it seems as if some program is monitoring me and interrupting. I have had great experience on my XP computer with my security software, never had a problem and have always had software that quietly traps unwanted spyware and malware and lets me keep working and decide when I want to remove or quarantine the bad stuff.

Microsoft and their computer mfg accomplices seem to want to create a ‘nanny state’ on my computer and treat me as if I don’t know jack. I hate it because it disrupts my work, my train of thought.

There are many other issues that I just don’t have the time to detail.

Well for the sake of this thread, can you detail ONE of the problems.

There have been studies (I can't cite them for you, but I'm sure you could do a search and find them on the web), that show that with identical hardware (and I'm talking a up-to-date, fast processor and 1024 or greater in ram), that the machine with Vista will run much slower than the machine with XP. We have Vista on a laptop and XP on two desktops. The Vista machine, again, has plenty of processing power and ram, and I cleared it of factory-supplied bloatware, but it still boots up very slowly, much slower than my last laptop (with an almost identical processor and ram) with XP, and appears to move about slower. So my experience has been the same as the tests.

We have not personally had any other problems with the Vista laptop, but we only use it for travel and occasional use in the kitchen. But for me, A DROP IN SPEED is enough of a reason alone, even aside from the many reported problems, that I do not want any other machine with Vista on it. I am going to assume that probably the main reason Vista boots and runs slower is all the fancy graphics, and see-thru bells and whistles.

I don't want to give up speed and simplicity of computing for "woo-woo" eye candy. Somehow, I think since the release of Visduh, that M-soft is finding out the hard way that there are many in the public who have that same point of view as I do about their bloatware offering.

I assure you this is not the same as going from 98 to XP. When I went to XP from 98 it was smooth and free of frustration.

Whatever your stake in Microsoft is you should understand this is not confined to a few XP diehards. This is a bad product from the user’s POV. Microsoft may think it’s a big improvement from their end. Obviously they did not take user experience seriously. The blogs I have read are 100% negative on Vista and many of them were beta testers before the product was released.

I found these when I started thinking about how to get back to XP. There are just a few, there are hundreds:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2554273&SiteID=17

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=543

http://www.news.com/The-XP-alternative-for-Vista-PCs/2100-1016_3-6209481.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO8cAwf-weo

This backlash is not just a few whiners expressing their distate for Vista.

"Well for the sake of this thread, can you detail ONE of the problems. I’ve been trying to get some concrete answer on what is so Bad about Vista, and it seems that the people taking the most trash cant seem to explain what is wrong with it." - VanDeKoik

More than a dozen such problems were detailed...and linked...in the article for this thread, so one has to presume that you haven't read it. You should. It's at the top of your screen.

What the article *didn't* tell you was that Vista isn't backwards compatible.

Software like Peachtree Accounting/ACT will run on Windows 98, NT, 2000, and XP, but won't run on Vista.

The article does point out that Vista is substantially slower than XP (and XP itself is 30% slower than Windows 2000), as well as that Vista doesn't support most hardware peripherals like printers and video cards that are compatible with Windows 2000 and XP.

But even ignoring all of the above, Vista crashes constantly and ignores owner commands like CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Frankly, ignoring owner commands is a fatal mistake for machines. Software should be discarded and hardware that do their own things rather than what their owner desires should be shot with large caliber ammunition.

"“We heard the same whines when XP was first released. “98 is faster! XP sucks!” And with 98 from 95 and 95 from 3.11. Same story, same people."

Nope. You're just pretending to ignore the problem.

Of course there are going to be bugs and complaints in any new release. XP got tagged with complaints for verifying that it was a legal copy. 2000 got complaints because some of its dll's performed calculations differently, resulting in math errors for products like Crystal Reports (which would otherwise calculate correctly on earlier OS's).

But the complaints against Vista (e.g. not backwards compatible, buggy, slow, crash-prone, lack of driver support) hark back to the days when MicroSoft had to pull MS-DOS 4 and Windows ME.

So Vista isn't the first fumble by the MicroSoft team. To be honest, it's surprising that MicroSoft survived the first paradigm shift from stand alone PC's to the modern Internet world. Redmond deserves kudos for not going the way of Wang.

Yet.

"I am also a Windows developer. Truthfully, it’s hard to establish Vista’s superiority until it’s been tried..."

No, it's hard to establish superiority when the product has none.

Especially security. Vista is wide open to hackers.

See: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/uac_security_ho.html

and

can be hijacked to delete files and folders: http://digg.com/software/Latest_Vista_Security_Hole_It_deletes_files_itself

and

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsvistasecurity/archive/2006/07/28/681833.aspx

I must disagree with your contention that you can provide security without a performance hit.

Here's a simple part of it: A lot of Vista isn't rewritten. It's old, broken, kludged, backwards-compatibility code wrapped with extra bounds checks and other such stuff to reduce its security risk. This extensive wrapping and re-checking, instead of just rewriting stuff correctly and rejecting ancient compatibility, takes processor cycles.

Apple, OTOH, dumped its old operating system because they knew it would be a bad idea to try to pull it into the modern age.

What’s really needed, IMHO, is software that can integrate the virtual-machine concept with a general operating system such that Windows programs that want to make changes to directories like “\program files” and “\windows” are free to do so, but those changes will only affect those particular programs. If someone wants to run a Windows 3.1 program, why not? Throw it in a virtual machine and let the program do what it wants within its own little world. Even if there’s a 90% performance hit for the VM, such a program would still run much faster than it would have on the machines for which it was designed.

Vista has never crashd on me, and I use it everyday on 2 different computers. I have seen some delays with ctrl-alt-del like you mentioned but only on a system that was upgraded and only has 512 ram. As for lack of compatibility with drivers and apps, once again that’s exactly what we saw when people upgraded from XP.

If it’s not a wise upgrade for you yet then neither was XP initially, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of happy customers with it right now. You csn claim it’s a disaster if you want, but Vista is already running on about as many systems as all existing Apple computers combined, and is a much easier product to adapt than Linux. If you want to bemoan the lack of commercial apps that platform is like being stranded in the desert.

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