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Articles: Alternative Operating Systems: |
Ram Hog Advice Is Vista a lemon?2007 could be the Year of the PenguinAfter a year of fortnight-long repairs of my repeatedly overheating Advent laptop, which came new, a year ago, with XP installed, PC World finally agreed that enough was enough, and gave me a shiny new, widescreen laptop of a higher specification, with Vista Home Basic installed. This high level of customer service was due mainly to the efforts of the store manager at Stretford, who also managed to speed up the paperwork considerably. When I bought the XP machine a year ago, I was able to plug a scanner, printer etc into it and Windows automatically installed its own device drivers - I didn't even need to use the disks that came with the hardware - an encouraging improvement on Win98. Vista? The device drivers on my hardware installation disks don't work, and there are few new device drivers available online or anywhere else, as Vista has been rolled out earlier than manufacturers had anticipated. Added to this are various features missing from the interface that were not lacking in earlier versions of Windows - like the 'up' arrow in Explorer, and extra RAM etc is needed just to run Vista at anything approaching the speed of a lower spec machine running XP. Microsoft publish a list
of Vista compatible hardware here. (Firefox users will see this
message: "The Windows Vista Hardware Compatibility List is currently
only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and above. We apologize for the
inconvenience.") The versions: Vista Home Basic comes pre-installed
on most machines, but doesn't include Media Centre, but you can pay for
an upgrade to: Some software or software installation programs won't run on Vista, but try the Compatibility Mode Wizard in the Help menu - for example, I was unable to complete the installation of the OEM version of Acronis 8 True Image that came bundled with a Freecom external hard drive, which I had used to make a backup disk-image of my old machine's hard drive, but was successful running the installer from the wizard. You just can't get the help these days: "The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which was used in previous versions of Windows and it is not supported in Windows Vista. " - If your old software does run, you won't be able to access the help information that came with it. So after a week of searching and telephoning, I am beginning to think it would be cheaper to buy a copy of XP and install it on the new machine than to replace all the peripherals. Easier said than done - PC World Customer care informs me that Microsoft have already withdrawn all retail copies of XP from PC World stores, stating that they (PC World) had no choice in the matter(!) OK XP is still available elsewhere, but for how long? - Try and buy a computer with XP pre-installed from any major retailer. This is contrary to Microsoft's own product life-cycle policy, which should allow retailers to sell licensed copies of XP up to Jan 31st 2008 and allows System Builders licences until Jan 31st 2009. It seems we are being forced into adopting
an OS that is neither ready nor fit for purpose, at tremendous environmental
cost: Millions of printers, scanners etc will end up in landfill,
(just where can you recycle electronic goods in this country?)
polluting the water table with heavy metals. Add to this the energy cost
of manufacturing new hardware - all so that someone can make a fast buck. |
