I got a new laptop on Friday, my old one was playing up (thanks to Rhys at Dick Smith Riccarton for sorting out a replacement easily). It came with Vista. I use Linux, but thought I’d shrink Vista down to a small partition and keep it just in case it came in handy.
But it wouldn’t shrink. Try as I might, I could not stop the Windows partition filling half my hard drive, despite there being plenty of free space.
Worse still, with 1GB of RAM (admittedly not much for Vista but the machine was sold with this and should work as sold) I kept getting messages saying I had run out of memory and had to close programs – even with NO programs open! I don’t know what it was doing in the background using up 1GB of RAM before I even tried to do anything.
Within a few hours I had given up and wiped Vista. I can’t mess round with software that won’t work, I have a thesis to write. I pity all you poor people struggling with Vista, I suppose it might be ok with 4GB of RAM but I really shouldn’t need that to edit a text document.
Samuel Dennis 
May 11, 2009 at 12:52 pm
[…] just gets better and better every year, and I can honestly say now that Ubuntu now has far fewer problems on my laptop (emachines D620) than Vista – even though it was sold with Vista! And I don’t have to worry about viruses, or deal […]
May 12, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Faced with a similar problem I took a different path, I bought an Apple iMac.
Brilliant it just works! was usable within 10 mins of getting it out of the box.
Sure it costs more but its looks like its a case of you get what you pay for!
Sb
May 12, 2009 at 9:20 pm
My old laptop was an Apple iBook (it’s now the wife’s). I have been a Mac man since primary school, and have lost count of how many old Macs I have in the shed! If I had the cash I’d have bought a MacBook when I last upgraded, but I moved to Linux a year ago for financial reasons.
I’d still recommend a Mac for anyone who isn’t as interested in fiddling with computers and doesn’t have a friendly geek to do the fiddling for them. Most of my family still use Macs.
Having moved myself however I prefer Linux to Mac OSX now, Linux interfaces generally combine the good points from both the Mac and Windows, and you end up with a really functional system that is completely customisable, for far cheaper.
August 13, 2009 at 5:25 pm
You need a higher version of Vista to get anything done. Windows Vista Home Basic is made NOT TO WORK! (For obvious reasons, they want you to upgrade to Home Premium )