Monday, 01 September 2008

The early experiences of XP were similar to Vista ...

Microsoft released the first version of XP in 2002. XP received a very cool reception. It did not capture the imagination of the public. SP2 arrived providing a radical change for this troubled operating system. The second service pack did much more than fix the bugs. It provided a whole new look and feel to the Windows environment.

I remember being warned about SP2. I was told not to install it. It was very unstable and caused major problems to machines everywhere. It was too late. I had already installed the upgrade.

SP2 proved to be a huge improvement over the original release. It solved many of the problems. As with all software releases there were some new issues, but regular updates eliminated most of these. Eventually most Windows users had changed to XP and were quite happy.

Just as XP has stabilised Microsoft released Vista. XP did not require a hardware upgrade. In fact it ran faster than the Windows 98 that I had been running. But Vista is seriously resource hungry. Get a new machine with a fast processor and 2 GB of RAM. You will also need a large hard drive. Vista uses lots of space. But with a fast machine, Vista runs quite quickly.

After three months I am quite happy with Vista. It has some great features to find your way around. On a fast machine it is fast. But its attempts to solve problems when something crashes are all in vain. I have yet to see Vista identifying a solution.

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