Full Technical Microsoft Vista Business 64-bit Review

I’ve used Vista Business 64-bit for over a year now.  I often read negitive review after negitive review about the operating system, but nobody technical has reviewed the software.   I mean someone who really uses a computer for all kinds of things, organizing tens of thousands of songs, edits video clips, makes webpages, thousands of pictures, etc, etc, etc.  I do, so here it goes:

CON:

First things first:

1. The first point everyone talks about (even mac here) is the million nags safety happening all the time.  A simple google search to turn that off.

2. The second item of business after a Vista install is you have to disable the power savings default, that turns off your hard drives in the event of 20 minutes of “inactivity”.  Let me define inactivity: screen saver: on.  Yep, you can be downloading windows updates, downloading anything, installing a huge program, defragging your hard drive, all will come back with errors if your computer “thinks” you have been inactive for 20 minutes.  Move the mouse and everything will pause then spin back up.

Now let’s go to the less annoying things, thence the more annoying:

3. The sound system is all messed up – so many options, you have to go to 3 places to mess with your sound. XP was much more simple and clean cut, not so many fancy options.  Didn’t castrate Creative Lab’s cards.

4.  The file view (or search) limitation is limited to 5,000 files.  I have 20,000 mp3s and when try to see how much space they all take up… I just can’t do it. The limit is 5,000 files.  When I highlight them all and right click, it will do nothing forever and just sit there.  So I can’t tell you how much space large quantity of files takes.

5. No performance increases.  I had a 5.7/5.9/5.9/5.9/5.9 on the performance scale, which is as high as you can go.  But it’s not really faster than XP. In fact, with all the time you spend messing with the other items on this list, it’s slower.

6. When you come back from a remote desktop, all of the Quick Launch icons have other applications icons.  Just a bug.

7. When you save something to your desktop, it will not immediate appear. That’s right, you have to go to your desktop and press F5 (Refresh) Then it will show up. This can be very frustrating.

8. No “Up Folder”

Yep, they have figured that people still don’t know what a path is.  Most path related items are gone, and you have to click on the address bar to even get a path.  No upfolder means you can just click up 10X and get back to the desktop, you have to manually type it in or “browse” IF the option is available, (many of the times it’s not).

And the last 2 annoyances:

9. File view/sorting WILL NOT stay put.  All advanced users view files in windows usually “Details” with file extensions.

In XP I can see my files how I like them: In Detail mode, Name, Size, Type & Date modified – select “apply to all folders” it’s set for the life of your OS. With Vista, I go though the exact same steps, but it keeps jumping back and forth to various (not just one, but several) various ways to view files.  That’s right, sometimes it goes to stupid idiotic thumbnail mode, or then picture mode, or some stupid graphical interface mode, or a dozen other modes. Sometimes the file size is gone, othertimes the date modified, sometimes it throws in date modified, or sometimes it will suddenly just randomly put them in “Group by file type”.  Every time I reboot it’s a fresh new set of jacked up file view settings.  E-V-E-R-Y S-I-N-G-L-E T-I-M-E. No joke.

I know what you’re thinking, you open a window and you make it look like you want it to.  Then you go to “Tools > Folder Options > View ” then hit “Apply to All Folders” thinking that you have now actually applied the current view to all folders. No, in fact you haven’t because the images folder, audio folders all keep their same idiotic file views, and they randomly keep reverting back if you set them otherwise.  When I say idiotic, I mean there is no file name, size, date modified, type, there is ID3 tag names: Artist, Album, Rating (5 star), and all kinds of useless crap.  Same goes for pictures and videos.  Annoying as 10 little children 24/7.  There are guides to help edit the registry and try and fix it, but after 3 new installs I can tell you that Vista does eventually reset it’s settings back to original factory default messed up way to view file settings.

10. The new Searching positively sucks.  It can’t hardly find any file, it’s trying to be so smart looking in the text of files (Html’s, Doc’s, .txt) and it’s annoying as crap.  I type in the name of 1 file and I get 99.9% false positives, no joke.  I’m not some idiot user that doesn’t know a file name, or can’t narrow it down with modified dates and such (which they’ve castrated as well, it’s no where near as powerful as XP was).  It also shows all kinds of stupid files that I have no idea why it thinks is anywhere remotely close to my search. It also has indexing issues.

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/search_for_files_in_windows_vista.html

Read the idiotic positive obviously paid for by M$ article, but read the comments below, universally, they are all negative saying basically “What are you smoking? It sucks!”  the solution seems to be use 3rd party search tools, but most 3rd party tools are just like it.

PRO:

Now, let’s get into the GOOD things about Vista, that I wish XP had:

1. You don’t need a floppy to install a RAID. About time!

2. When you have a list of files or folders, and you want to go down to view the ones that start with “S” you hit “S” and in XP, it would go to the first “S”, like so:

Now you have to scroll down to see all of the files/folders that start with “S”.  Advanced users usually hit “T” and if they want to view “S” files/folder.

But in Vista, they’ve fixed it. You hit “S” in a folder and you get this:

Ah! Exactly what you want.  This is certainly a pro.

#. Dragon Naturally Speaking.  The uppity-ups at Dragon never ever supported 64-bit operating systems and have done nothing in FIVE YEARS dealing with 64-bit systems.  Laughable.  Five years in computer terms is literally about a hundred years in any other field of development.  To ignore customers that long they found customers leaving in droves to Vista Business with Windows new Voice to Speech.  I will attest it’s better than Dragon in ever way shape and form, and it’s “free” (included in the price) in Business and Ultimate versions of Vista.  Nice. Presently (Summer 2009) Dragon has realized their idiocy and has scrambled and put out a ultra buggy version of Dragon for 64-bit Vista and between $200 and $600.  My recommendations, stick with Vista’s.

So it’s more annoying, slightly prettier, a lot less functional.  I wouldn’t say it’s any more buggy.  It’s as solid as XP.  I keep hearing that Vista has fixed “the bugs” and it’s not the bugs that are annoying people.  It’s the software that needs fixing.  The the programmed in “features” that are annoying. It’s just terrible for power users.

So with the embarrassment of Vista, Windows 7 is coming out…

So Microsoft, have you fixed these problems?  If you have fixed search and file view, I may bite, otherwise, I’m going back to XP -64-bit with my next  i7 upgrade.

Cheers,

Darrell

ps. The computer used was: E8500/8GB/2X1.5TB/P965/ ATI4850/Dell30″/AntecP192Case