Why Should You Stay Away From Vista?

 

Let us start with a small fairy tale. Once upon a time, (alhough not a very long time ago) I had a dual-boot system with Windows Vista and Ubuntu installed side-by-side. I was happy with my Ubuntu but had to resort to using the bulky Vista from time-to-time. Everytime I opened my laptop in class with Vista, my friends like Abhishek used to cry out - "Bad Vista, Bad Vista" while geek friends like Asiem used to quietly disapprove my system. I used to envy the celeron users, who inspite of half my system capabilities with Windows XP were faster than my bulky Vista. In the home however, I was always in the dilemma, should I vent my frustration on the 50K laptop or not for the crimes of Vista.

I never understood the need for a 15 GB Operating System which in the name of security will kill you with pop-up boxes for every small task you dare perform. An OS which is doing nothing more than eating up RAM and processor cycles yet you see no improvements. An over-hyped UI with transparency which is now found at low costs in its predecessors too. Not to mention the fact that Free OS like Linux have been using the same for the past 8 years.

But I could always tolerate these nuisances of Vista, as I have a high-end system I argued. But then there was always the problem of non-working or in-compatible applications and games. Not to mention all my cherished arcade games which used to run in 16 bit emulation mode were rendered non-working by this system.

I do not understand the software guys at Microsoft, first they make up such a good OS as XP which is so successful world-wide and then how can they take such a drastic decision as to rewrite all their previous code. How could an experienced company like Microsoft forget the most basic rule in Software Engineering - Working code is the best code. With this single wrong decision, Microsoft lost billions of dollars in terms of delays, not to mention the loss of face in public and hardware firms but also the loss of experience of 20 years of writing Operating System codes by abandoning the previous codes.

They had to do all the testing and debugging again. I can imagine that XP's code would have had many hacks(or jugaar as we say in Hindi) over they years with the zillions of bug-fixes. But atleast, it was working. For a user, whether a code looks beautiful or not, it doesn't matter, as long as it works. But as a user, Vista doesn't work even though its code may be much more readable than its predecessor. I do not have any advantage of that as it is not even open-source.

So, in short, the moral of the story is : Stay Away From Vista.... (if you did not know it before-hand).