Customer Reviews: Read 89 more reviews...
 Gets better the longer you use it. July 19, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought a dell inspiron 1520 laptop with vista premium pre-installed. At first it took an age to start up and I nearly thought about going back to XP!
But I started to notice something strange. Everytime I rebooted the PC it took less time than before. The cache system learns what you load and organises programs to start up quickly.
It now takes no longer to boot up than XP used to. Installing service pack 1 improved things further.
And after using it for 6 months I honestly think its very good. The interface is nice, performance is decent in games, applications load very quickly and NOT once in 6 months has the system rebooted, crashed, or frozen! Thats stability. With XP something crashed at least once a week. I've not even had the "this program has performed an ilegal operation and will be shut down message"!
I was even more impressed when I used my families XP based computers. Very new, quad core and dual core desktops but they were hanging/pausing, everything seemed to take that bit longer to do than in vista and I had to reboot one of them when all I could load was explorer!
All my drivers and products work flawlessly. I suspect that given this computer was designed for vista thats not suprising but my other peripherals all work well.
If you're not getting on with vista I suggest the following
1. Install vista service pack 1 (that does reduce hard disk access and make better use of memory)
2. Upgrade memory to 2GB. It may say you need 512MB but trust me, on a system with 1GB it is unbelievably slow! A friends laptop has this and its awful. Takes 3 minutes to load and about 20 seconds to load internet explorer! Mine has 2GB and takes about 1 minute to boot and 2 seconds to load internet explorer. Thats the difference memory makes!
3. Disable some of the services. I disable windows seach because I don't use it often and whilst it may result in super quick searches, the rest of the time the hard drives churning away indexing stuff. Slows things down.
4. Uprgrade all of your drivers to the latest version. Some of the drivers on your original discs will not work with vista but most manufactuers have drivers which support it now online.
Only upgrade if you have a decent PC (in particular 2GB memory).
I understand its not perfect for everyones uses/computer systems but I have to give it 5 stars because my experience has been flawless.
 so slow: use xp, linux, dos, anything in preference May 25, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
i have vista on my laptop. i wish i did not. it is so slow. click, wait 15-30 seconds, eventually something happens. this is on new top spec laptop.
i give 1 star, as zero is not an option
Thank you Vista... April 27, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
Thank you Microsoft. No really... I installed Vista when it first came out on my HP Desktop. I can't quite put my finger on what irritates me most about Microsofts new OS, but here are a couple of candidates.
1. Speed. With all the eye candy turned on the OS just seems to take an age to respond to simple requests. This is despite my kit being relatively new and, while not top of the range, definitely well above the minimum spec. What's even more irritating is the start up time - I can wait 7 minutes from pressing the on button to being able to start an application. This is pretty unacceptable on a machine with 2GB RAM, a fast processor and decent graphics card.
2. User interface. I don't think that XP was by any means a style icon, but the new interface seems to be all style and no substance. Sure, some of the tricks in Aero look fantastic, but once the novelty wears off the irritations begin. Try, for example, to toggle between showing hidden and system files and not. On XP this is a doddle - it's in the view options. In Vista, for whatever reason, you need to drop out of the explorer into control panel to acheive the same effect. A pain, and not intuitive. Security may have been improved, but this is a real pain - why do I need to confirm twice that I want to change the location of a menu item. It's not even consistent - applications seem to be able to dial out while a simple local DOS application generates warnings every time it runs. Very irritating when it runs several times a day...
So, why the thank you. Well, such was the irritation that I found myself using my MacBook more and more. I'm now over the initial disorientation from OSX and appreciate the smooth, quick, elegant and well designed interface. So much so that not only have I ditched Vista, but I've ditched the PC and bought myself a lovely new Mac Pro. Sure, I need Windows occasionally (less than you'd think), but Boot Camp and XP sorts that out.
In short, Vista is a mess. Too many of the previewed features have been dropped and we're left with a compromised OS that underperforms it predecessor. The sooner MS get on with producing the operating system it should have done and consigns Vista to the electronic hell it surely deserves the better. Until then, Bill Gates has give Apple their best sales tool yet.
wow, really good. February 28, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I've been using Windows Xp for a while now and was cautious about upgrading to this system as Windows Xp seemed to be working fine. However I find myself enjoying using the computer a whole lot more. After installing Vista, windows then detected and deleted lots of spyware (and a virus) that I didn't even know I had.
All of my old software seems to work fine on Vista except for one really old one which started working recently after Windows installed a Windows update automatically- it seems all the software problems are fixed now.
My bluetooth dongle got automatically installed on Vista where it failed to on Xp so i'm happy with hardware support.
It did however fail to automatically install a HP printer I had, however after it failed to install it a new program appeared called 'Windows Problems and Solution Center' with a message telling me why the printer wasn't working and even supplied a link to the HP downloads website for me to download the driver and install it myself- it works now!
Vista seems to be smooth in it's performance, i've had it for a few months now and if anything it's been getting faster though the many performance updates it's automatically installed over time.
I love the Windows Media Center, it plays all my xvid/divx/avi videos and works as a tv recorder. I use it to play music when I have mates round and at family events I hook it up to the TV (which is really easy with Vista) and play the days events with background music- Media Center does the soothing transitions automatically ;D.
I just really love this operating system.
Well Done Microsoft! Glad it took almost 6 years to make this version of windows - because they got it right!
A nightmare ! February 22, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I've just bought a laptop with 2gb of memory and discovered that half the memory is used for Vista and the onboard video.
Some of my old programs won't install properly...if at all..and irritating message boxes keep cropping up asking mundane questions.
For me Microsoft have tried to incorporate too many programs which are second rate and are completely useless for people who have third party software.
I tried to connect my old printer and scanner and failed.
I have written to Dell about a week ago to see if I could downgrade to XP but I have had no reply. Perhaps Dell are now using Vista.
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