I do.

Against all the jesting of my friends and co-workers. Against the mass media commentary. Against everything the computer industry seems to think… I say stop bashing Windows Vista. Moreover, I will even go ahead and say its okay (not good, just okay). Yes, I use it on both my desktop and laptop both the 32 bit version and the 64 bit version. I am not really all that proud that I do… but if you want to get DX10 and 64-bit its really the only game in town. And, I am not one of those fanboys that came in after SP1 was out and asked what all the fuss was about. I used Vista RC1 and managed to trash it five minutes after install. I have been around the Vista block – I know what I am talking about.

I’ll tell you what I like, what I don’t like, and how you can bring Vista into a much more usable condition on your own home computer. Get ready, misconceptions are about to be shattered!

What I like

Vista’s extensive list of features has been talked about on countless sites on the Internet. Go ahead and look it up… you will find out everything they have to offer. I’ll briefly mention a couple of great ones and what probably amount to the strongest reasons why I didn’t delete it the first day I tried it.

First off, the UI is really brilliant if you have home premium or any better version. Aero is a great UI that not only looks sleek, it is (fairly – we’ll get to this) intuitive to use and manage. The toolbars and menus are all vibrant and warm feeling… its definitely a good UI to work with.

Secondly, driver support for 64-bit versions of Windows has really come around – unfortunately its been for Windows Vista and NOT for Windows XP. 64-bit drivers on XP are notoriously hard to get your hands on and many of them are buggy at best. Despite all the “lol driver support on vista is teh suck”, it really is perfectly fine. Unless you are either using software from 1992 (upgrade) or hardware from some ultra obscure manufacturer that thinks XP is the one and only operating system, you are safe.

Third, if you have upgraded to Vista SP1, everything works fine. They fixed most of the really plaguing problems with SP1 including file copying issues, permissions requests, etc. If people told you Vista sucked balls, they probably did so on a non-SP1 install.

What I don’t like

It is, however, not without its share of problems.

First off, by default, UAC is incredibly invasive… bordering on the side of ultra-annoying. For the professional user, turning it off is no big threat. For the average user, it may be keeping you safe but UAC is so invasive it almost demands that you turn it off (not before hitting you with a permissions request first though).

Secondly, related to UAC, many applications will not run properly unless they are run as administrator. Thus, prudence suggests that you start every application as an adminitrator which is inheritily against the security model that Microsoft was striving to create. I don’t know the best way to fix this, but the current model lends itself to people just trying to do whatever they can to not be bothered by that pesky message.

Third, that widget panel is all well and good… but damn does it get in the way from time to time. One mis-click and you are minimizing half your desktop windows just to get to whats hidden behind the widget panel. More of an annoyance than anything else.

Making it work

To make Vista a little more bearable, you need only make a few minor changes.

First, if you feel you are comfortable with it, disable UAC. You will need to reboot, but once you do you will find a lot less hassle, applications that you forgot to run as admin will suddenly work, and all will become right with the world.

Second, turn off search indexing… you won’t really be searching enough for indexing to matter and if you have a CPU that has been manufactured in the past eight years it won’t scrap that much time off the search. Search indexing is a way of caching your data so it can be searched faster than a straight parse of hard-drive contents… aka, not critical. They are using a solid search algorithm that gets the job done pretty quickly. Also, to make it even better, it searches recursively below your current directory so if you have an idea of where the file is, you can reduce search time simply by accessing the top-level folder and running the search.

Third, get some more RAM. I hate to say it, but four gigs of RAM is really what it takes to make Vista shine. Due to Vista’s application caching system, more RAM means more application data is stored, means applications load faster. A lot of people have dogged Vista’s RAM management but that is only the people who fail to understand how it works. Much like a Linux distro, unless RAM is needed it won’t get freed up because there is simply no need to free it up. It’s a decent assumption that something in RAM might get used again, so why bother throwing it away in favor of free space when nothing new will be put in that space. Might as well just hold on to it in case its used again.