I’ve been using Windows Vista Home Basic for about three or four days. Obviously, this is not a long time. But within this time, I’ve found some significant problems.
First, let me say Vista is very beautiful looking. The colors, fonts, themes, and all the other visual details are great. Secondly, it appears faster than XP.
But in order for it to be of use to me by helping me get my work done, I need third-party vendors to support it, now. For example, HP does not have a Vista driver for my HP2600N LaserJet color printer. This is a current printer and, you would think, HP would have had time to write drivers for their current product line. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Further, my Cingular wireless laptop card for accessing the Internet also doesn’t have a driver (although Sierra Wireless has a stub that may work). Cingular goes so far as to say it’s the user’s fault that no driver is ready because the user should not be using new software! Talk about customer service.
Although many people already have Vista installed on their computers, these users are willingly taking part in leading edge software deployments and should expect that many popular applications and hardware devices will not work with their computer. Cingular Wireless does not at this time provide support for any connectivity solutions on the Windows Vista operating system.
Even installing the Adobe Acrobat 8 reader failed because, according to the error, the Temp directory was inaccessible or full. I assume this is because the directory that Adobe was trying to install to was set as read only and no matter what I tried, Vista would not allow me to change the permissions (yes, I was logged in with administrative privileges).
Lastly, I’ve already mentioned, in another post, my intermittent problems with the DVD/CD-RW drive.
All told, I am not able to print, use the wireless card, or reliably access the DVD/CD-RW drive. Based on this, I reformatted the drive and installed Windows XP.
What pains me even more is that there isn’t a better alternative. Both Linux and the Mac OS X have their won problems with third-party support, so switching to those operating systems are also a no go.
Perhaps in a year or two the third-party vendors will take the needs of their customers into consideration and provide Vista compatible drivers. Or maybe not. Until then, unless you have everything Vista compliant, I would not recommend installing Vista.
Aloha!
Misc. Ramblings 