How To Survive Windows Vista, Part I
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
We have to face facts, people. Microsoft has deprecated Windows XP in favour of Windows Vista. I’ve been having difficulty coming to terms with this, largely because of what I see as major flaws in Vista. To make things worse, Windows XP will no longer be supported two years after the release date of Vista. In theory, anyway. I suspect that Microsoft will have to extend Windows XP’s life cycle because of the slow corporate adoption rate of Windows Vista, but as of this writing, it looks like XP will be unsupported by April 14, 2009.
I intend to offer some solutions to the many problems with Windows Vista, and help people survive this maddening upgrade process. But before I can provide solutions, I need to explain what problems exist. I won’t have solutions for all of them, but I do believe my solutions can overcome many of them.
Here are the issues, as I see them:
- Bloat
Windows Vista’s default install, when compared to Windows XP, is just plain ridiculous. I mean, really, look at it. If you check disk usage, you’ll see that it consumes nearly three times as much disk space (XP takes 2.66GB on a default install, and Vista takes 7.60GB). For those of us without RAID arrays or massive hard disks (i.e. laptop users), this is just deadly. Since I’m also a software developer, my development tools take several gigabytes of space as well. This, combined with the default install size, means that I get much less disk space to work with when developing software.
Further, the default installs take considerably different amounts of RAM to run. XP takes 43.15MB to run, Vista takes 235MB (five times as much). And that’s not including the system cache. In total, on a default install, XP consumes 207MB and Vista consumes 770MB (nearly four times as much). I realize that Vista is considerably newer, and therefore designed for a different caliber of machine, but come on. Seriously, this is ridiculous. You can’t justify taking more than a half gigabyte of RAM when just running the default install. A Windows Vista upgrade would demand much more physical RAM than people have previously needed. For Vista, running it with any less than 2GB of RAM feels very sluggish. Windows XP can be run with as little as 512MB without any slowdown. Perceptually speaking, Windows Vista demands four times as much RAM as Windows XP.
- Speed
I am disappointed with the general performance of Windows Vista, especially relative to previous versions. Windows 2000 was lightning fast, and Windows XP was only slightly slower than 2000, but the many kernel improvements and so forth made it a worthwhile upgrade. Vista, though, is terribly slow. The UI feels generally sluggish, and it doesn’t help that Vista tends to keep prefetching things and paging to the hard disk on machines with less than 2GB of RAM.
Windows Vista also will inexplicably thrash the hard disk periodically. It grinds and whirs for long periods of time with no explanation as to what’s going on. This disk thrashing causes a massive slowdown for most applications, especially when Windows is forced to retrieve something that’s been paged to the hard disk.
Further, Windows Vista has become notorious for poor gaming performance. But it could have been much worse. Let me recap the history of OpenGL in Vista for those who haven’t kept up with the news. First Microsoft crippled OpenGL, which is used in roughly half of the games available today for graphics. This caused quite a disturbance in the gaming community, and justifiably so. Games with OpenGL graphics would run at half the speed. Microsoft then decided to bring OpenGL support back into Vista, likely realizing what a terrible move it was to remove support for it. But benchmarks have shown that Microsoft didn’t quite get it right. Gaming performance takes a hit on Vista.
- Compatibility
Some software just refuses to work on Windows Vista. This one is a really widespread issue, and I would wager that any Vista user reading this has encountered compatibility problems at least once during the Vista upgrade process. Many of the compatibility problems are not rooted in the operating system itself, but rather in the security model that Vista uses.
- Security
Windows Vista may be the “most secure operating system Microsoft has ever released” (Google this phrase, Microsoft uses it like a mantra), but “most secure” in Microsoft’s terms is not really equivalent to “secure” in everyone else’s terms. You could get a barrel of rotten apples, find the least rotten one and say that it is the “most fresh” apple in the barrel. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to eat or that it’s fresh. It’s just the most fresh. Vista’s security model seems wrong to me. The constant nagging for “Continue”/”Cancel” or “Allow”/”Cancel” is the wrong way to do things. Let me present a hypothetical, but not unlikely, scenario:
A woman’s son sets up a computer for her. All she does is just basic tasks like email, word processing, and so forth. The son decides it’s best to let her work with it for a while and help her through any stumbling blocks she may encounter. Since the computer is running Windows Vista, one of the first things she encounters is the worrisome “Windows needs your permission to run this program” dialog. She is especially concerned by the note at the bottom of the dialog that says “This program can potentially harm your computer.” Her son tells her that Windows will say that quite often and to just click “Continue” or “Allow” whenever a dialog like that pops up.
The problem in this scenario is that the dialog’s purpose is now defeated. Whenever the dialog comes up, the mother will click “Continue” or “Allow”, unable to discern whether the program is legitimate or harmful. Most end users won’t have the skill to determine what programs are safe to run or not. This basically means the security model is just useless. It basically degenerates into a chatty and annoying “feature” in Windows.
There are better security models to use. Microsoft just needs to research to find a better one.
- Incentive
What really is the incentive to upgrade to Windows Vista? Sure, there are a few new features, but nothing that I find myself using on a regular basis. Microsoft keeps saying that Windows Vista Ultimate is the best one to go with because of the “many advantages”. What advantages? The Windows Ultimate Extras gimmick is just a joke. There have been 3 “extras” for Ultimate in the past year, and only one of them came out after the first month of Vista’s availability (Dreamscene, another performance-killer).
Microsoft has also really failed at advertising for Windows Vista. The commercials for Vista really do pale in comparison to the commercials for XP. The features they really like to hype are things like Aero, the superfluous visual effects engine (adds the glassy window borders and gaussian blur). Aero is pretty much useless. They also hype the new TCP/IP stack. I don’t know, but this sounds to me like the programmers were proud of whatever work they did on the TCP/IP stack and said that it warranted calling it a new “feature”. Most users don’t even notice the new TCP/IP stack.
Don’t be discouraged by all of Windows Vista’s shortcomings. I intend to offer some clear solutions to many of the problems that Windows has demonstrated. However, this post has become much lengthier than I originally intended.
I will continue this article in part two next week.
I would love to hear about your own Windows Vista troubles, suggestions on how to overcome such troubles, and your opinions on what you read in this blog. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!