Coastal Computers & Design
Well, nearly a year has passed since the introduction of Microsoft’s latest version of Windows. How does it stack up against XP? To sum it up in a word… ‘yawn’. To be honest, there isn’t really anything that you can do with Vista that you can’t do in Windows XP – and some things (or many depending on who you talk to) that don’t work as well, if at all, in Vista compared to XP.
It seems that Microsoft has a history of following a great Windows version with a less-than-great offering. Windows95 was a fantastic improvement over Windows 3.x (gee, I’m showing my age now), while Windows 98 (pre-Second Edition anyway) seemed to crash whenever it felt like it. Windows 2000 was another great leap forward (and is what XP is based on), while WindowsME…. well let’s just say – it really was a piece of junk.
Vista promised the earth and seems so far to have delivered either problems or slower computers. To compound Microsoft’s problems, SP3 (Service Pack 3) for Windows XP has been released in ‘beta’ format to testers who already have given it the big thumbs up and estimates of speed improvements over XP SP2 range from 10-15% (which is a remarkable improvement). The soon to be released SP1 for Vista however, just fixes a few squillion bugs but offers no such speed improvements…
Well, I’m in no hurry to upgrade my office PC and as I’m still able to obtain XP for customers, I’ll recommend that they stay with XP for a while yet!