Barthos Computers Blog

It’s certainly been a rocky start for Microsoft’s latest OS, which has had its ups and downs since launching a little over a year ago. Despite the fact that most of these people have never actually used it, there is still an overwhelming number of detractors. Many people see Vista as sluggish and bloated.

After a year, the market share for Vista has barely reached 12% (source), with most people preferring to stick with XP. Looking at this site’s visitors’ stats, it appears to be true (about 11% of the readers of this site use Vista).

It appears that Microsoft have a lot of work cut out for them in order to convince the majority of the public that they should upgrade to Vista. Personally, I have been using it since about Day 1, and have nothing but good things to say about it. Assuming you have a decent computer (anything built in 2007 or later will be fine) and enough ram (with today’s prices, there really is no excuse to have less than 2GB installed) it is quite snappy. The extra features and gadgets are nice, and stability is rock solid. I am writing this on a PC that hasn’t been rebooted in over 6 months.

Still, there is a lot of work to be done, and this month Microsoft is releasing a huge Service Pack that contains fixes and updates that range from important performance issues to deep-down functionality tweaks. SP1 is already available to MSDN subscribers, and will be made available to the public within a few weeks. For an insane amount of details, feel free to take a look at Microsoft’s SP1 whitepaper. It will tell you everything you need to know, and more. SP1 also includes all the fixes that have been released since launch.

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