Microsoft Vista 64bit-- buggy

Well -- another sad Microsoft story. My take-home message here is that Linux is looking pretty good and that Vista is even worse than XP.

I ended up with Vista when my laptop was stolen on Jan 1 of 2009, and I had to buy a new one. I realized from talking to my teenage son that Vista was frowned upon by those who are in the know, but I thought (foolishly) that my technical expertise would allow me to survive the involuntary switch from Windows XP to Vista. Little did I realize that MEI microcenter in Chicago (who sold me this laptop), had not only inflicted me with Vista, but also an especially nasty version of it - -Vista 64 bit.

First, as a general comment, once you turn off all of those strange security warnings that pop up every 3 minutes, Vista is basically just a crippled XP with lipstick. So far, I haven't found anything that Vista can do that I couldn't do in XPquicker and more reliably. On the other hand, the "home" version of Vista leaves out critical function included in XP (encryption and the ability to join a domain). Thus, the standard version of Vista is intentially crippled, presumably so that Microsoft can make more money. Regarding the lipstick - Vista has a the prettier screen saver and desktop wallpaper. Terrific. Vista comes with just enough changes to the menu system that it is very frustrating. Still, nothing that one can't learn in a couple of days.

The two most amazing things about Vista 64 bit is that it doesn't really work. It doesn't run other Microsoft products (such as Microsoft-Access ODBC drivers), and it crashes very regularly -- at least once/hour. It crashes in a nice way - it doesn't produce a blue screen of death, but rather it says - -"xxx has stopped working ...". Internet explorer stops working, PDF readers stop working - - Word stops working - -these are not fly-by-night marginal software programs - -these are critical programs that just stop in and crash. What an odd situation -- Microsoft has released a operating system that doesn't work. I have learned to ignore these warnings - -which seem to be generated by something taking longer to finish than Vista expected.

It is no wonder that Microsoft is losing ground to Apple and Ubuntu. Both of these operating systems are built on Unix code, and both benefit from the open-source community of developers.

Linux (Ubuntu) is looking a lot better --

When my laptop crashed, and I had to reinstall some operating system, I was surprised to find out that Ubuntu installs very easily (compared to Windows) and also can read my "crashed" windows file system. The take home lession that I gained here is that one should always have a method of booting a "rescue" operating system. Also it seems that none of the Window's software based security features can withstand a knowledable person with physical access. All it takes is a "live distro" disk, and you can read anything you want on a ntfs file system. Of course, with the recent crippling of Vista's encryption, the problem has only gotten worse.

I had the occasion recently to do some reading about Linux. Did you realize that Linux doesn't need antivirus because nobody has succeeded in hacking Linux ? Linux runs for as long as a year without needing to reboot ? Linux software is generally free ? It installs much more quickly and more reliably than Windows ? Wow ! I am going to work on getting more familiar with Linux. Perhaps I can avoid this whole Microsoft thing next time I have a major crash.

How to work around Vista

To recap, so far the Vista problems are:

Lack of critical drivers
Constant time wasting from security warnings and the like.
No security built into the home version (encryption)
Incomplete network support in the home version
Very difficult to recover from a crash

In the long term, it seems to me that it would be best to switch from Vista to Linux, and keep some sort of connection to an old Microsoft operating system -- perhaps XP or 2000 -- when one needs to run some critical old windows program (such as Office). This will take me some time, so here are my short term reactions.

Anyway -- what I decided to do was to spend another $100 and get a "virtual machine" program from VMware. I am going to install a Windows XP machine under Vista 64 bit, and just drop back to XP when I need to. At this writing, this has taken me a lot of time and I am not yet sure if it will work. It takes an immense amount of time to set itself up (i.e. hours).

I also downloaded and installed a 3rd-party encryption program called "truecrypt". This seems pretty good, although it took me some time to figure out how to set it up. It works better than the XP encryption program, and looks very solid. I would not recommend it for a casual PC user.

I am also going to set up my laptop as a "dual boot" to Linux, so I can learn the up-and-coming operating system. This also gives me some insurance -- if Vista finally goes belly up and won't boot at all, I can just switch to Ubuntu.