Windows Vista Ultimate Edition - Hands-on review
Conclusion:
I think it’s fair to begin our summation of Windows Vista by saying, quite definitively, that it won’t succeed in converting any Mac or Linux stalwarts to its cause, and quite frankly it was never likely to.
With that out of the way, we can begin to consider Windows Vista’s capabilities as a straight upgrade from Windows XP. Unfortunately, after expectations were raised so high by previews of the initial versions of Longhorn, WinFS and all, you can’t help but be a little tainted by that experience when it comes to looking at the final, released copy of Vista. Compared to the initial jump up to Windows 2000 from Windows 9x, and even from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, you can’t help but feel that much of what Vista is offering is purely cosmetic… Largely because it is.
Having said that, those cosmetic enhancements do on occasion add to the day to day usability of the Operating System away from simply offering eye candy - The real-time previews of minimised tasks and when task switching in particular have become an instant favourite of mine, and little things like the new copy dialogue box and folder tree listing in Windows Explorer (once you’ve got used to it) are actually very clean and user-friendly indeed.
That aside, the other additions to Windows Vista will vary in usefulness dependant on your usage patterns. DirectX 10 will inevitably end up as a must-have for gamers, whether they like Vista or not, while User Account Control will be cursed by anyone who knows what they’re doing, until they have to build a new PC for their parents and will be relieved that they can lock a system down without completely destroying the end-user experience. It still feels like a rather bodged way of making Windows secure after all those years of lax thinking on that front, but it’s a step in the right direction at least. Most of the other additions are too minor to be worthy of any huge mention, but improvements to Windows Firewall and other aspects of the Explorer interface have again helped usability quite nicely.
But do those additions add enough to justify the cost of an upgrade? At this moment in time, I’d say no. That isn’t to say that Windows Vista is the slow, bloated behemoth many have been ready to label it (from my experience is runs at least as quickly as Windows XP), but there just isn’t anything really revolutionary that will wow seasoned Windows users to make them clamour for something new.
At the end of the day then, Windows Vista is an improvement over what came before in many ways, that much is for certain - Whether it offers sufficient improvement for you to upgrade is a more personal choice however.