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Friday, October 31, 2008

Vista vs XP

 I have had an interesting time with my computers this week and it has set me straight about XP and Vista. I use XP at work but I have a laptop and desktop at home which I was using and they were Vista and Office 2007. I came to Vista with an open mind and quite like the shiny new look. It was irritating me because it kept checking and double checking what I was doing and then the endless updates became a joke. I have had yet another stream of updates tonight. We have an XP laptop and on Tuesday for reasons best known to itself it lost the onboard wifi connection to the Net. I thought it would be easy to get it back. No. I cleaned everything. I checked everything, updated drivers and then did what you do these days...Google. As it turned out I was not alone with this problem but there did not seem to be a solution on any of the problems. The two I tried just didn't work. So then I did a clean install to no avail and as I did I suddenly thought that XP just was old hat. I re established the connection with a USB wifi adaptor and it's fine but a bit silly on a laptop. So now I use that laptop for my work things because I don't really need the Net for that. I was relieved to get back onto Vista. Vista does weirdo things like uninstall my supposedly compatible printer which is highly annoying but it fixes things up pretty quickly. I like how it looks and I like how it is set up for use. I accept it is trying to help people and builds in security against malicious damage and inadvertent absentmindedness on the part of the user. By and large it is very flexible and Office 2007 allows me to produce things which have a wow factor and make me look good. My previous opinion was that XP was better but when I had connection problems with Vista it had the whole lot sorted out within half and hour or less and the thing is, when it goes wrong on Vista, the help is somehow there to get the problem resolved quickly. The other criticism I have heard is that it won't run old programmes. I have some ancient software and it runs perfectly well as does the new software. There is not a programme I have had a problem with and I have not had to abandon any of my software that I like.

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