Vista is slow. It is slower at everything than windows XP. There are benchmarks to back it up. Expect at least a 20% framerate hit in games.
Vista has hardware compatibility problems. Thousands of devices do not work in vista. Including until very recently, the Zune (made by microsoft).
Vista has software compatibility problems. Programs not specifically designed to deal with vista's half-assed "security" will have problems. Games can no longer write to their own directories. The rendering pipeline is hosed. You
will have problems.Â
Vista is unstable and buggy. Alt + Tabbing fullscreen OpenGL apps may cause freezing. Network connection may fail at random. Gui may be corrupted or produce artifacts at any time. These are just the problems I've had on the vista machine I've been using for a few days.
Vista is corrupt. Serious compromises to the performance of vista have been made to satisfy demands of the recording and movie industries. Every time you play a media file, a watchdog service is started to make sure you're not pirating something. This service is started even if you are watching an unprotected media file. In some cases this service can use so much cpu time that it makes HD video playback impossible.Â
Vista has wrong-headed ideas about security. UAC is completely useless. It does not prevent you from installing viruses or destroying your computer, it simply makes it difficult to run things and makes you click buttons twice as much as you used to. Note that when you run the Blockland installer on vista, it immediately launches Blockland without propmting you, but after that you cannot re-run Blockland without admin privelages. This means that a program could easily launch any other program on your computer without you being aware of it. UAC is a false sense of security and a pain in the ass. Furthermore, since you have to click through the UAC to run
everything you learn to completely ignore it's warnings (see
the boy who cried "wolf").Â
You cannot have an exe write to the program files directory in vista, so all program data is redirected to the app-data folder. Except this folder is hidden by default so no one knows where the panda their data is. Seperate user and program directories is an idea they took from unix, but as usual they did it half-assed so it doesn't work.Â
The UAC prevents installing and running activeX controls - including the microsoft genuine advantage tool which is required to download things from the microsoft site. It does not prompt you for permission, it simply fails.Â
Read this article and all of the articles it links to, and all the the articles they link to, then try not to kill yourself when you realize that there are billions of dollars being spent trying to get everyone in the world to use this garbage.
http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspxAs I've said before Vista is literally worse than aids. I mean it is literally costing the world more than the HIV virus. Clicking through the UAC alone has probably cost the world a hundred man-years of productivity already. I think that the gates foundation was spawned entirely out of Bill's guilt over the plague he has unleashed on the world.
