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Stop avoiding Windows Vista
Tech News and Advice
By Philip DiStefano
With Windows 7 on the horizon, some of you may be wondering what relevance Windows Vista still has. To put it quite simply, some people are still purchasing new computers with Windows XP or paying for a Windows XP downgrade - a practice that is utterly ridiculous given the benefits of using Windows Vista.
Windows Vista is, for the most part, an under-the-hood release - that is, the major changes it features that differ from XP are mostly things that users can't actually see, but do benefit from. That's not to say that there are no new features that users will observe.
The biggest thing the user will notice is probably the shiny new graphical user interface, Aero, and after that, the new User Account Control system, which, like it or not, is proven to keep your system safer. Then there are hoards of other newer, smaller features, but to focus on those would be somewhat foolish, because it's really the under-the-hood features that matter in Vista.
One such new core technology feature is called SuperFetch, a feature that analyzes data that Vista frequently uses and stores it in a cache in your unused RAM, which allows for much faster access times to that data. It may sound like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo if you're not a techie, but SuperFetch is actually quite an intelligent feature that increases the efficiency and speed of your daily tasks.
Vista also brought about WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model), which is designed to improve the performance and stability of graphics drivers. For those not in the know, drivers are small programs that let your operating system interact with the actual hardware in your computer. When drivers fail, it's typically bad news for your system, and will probably bring about the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
Drivers for your video card - the hardware device that creates and sends the display out to your monitor - are no different. However, thanks to WDDM, the drivers can be restarted on the fly. That means less crashes due to video card driver faults and less restarts overall.
Even when you don't account for the User Account Control system, Vista is still more secure than XP. Thanks to ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), data in memory is randomized, and thus it is much harder to inject malicious code into. This means that out of the box, Vista is inherently safer. Throw User Account Control back into the mix, and it's much safer.
If you've ever had your music start skipping while doing a lot of other resource intensive tasks, Vista would alleviate that problem. Thanks to its new Multimedia Class Scheduler Service, audio can be run at an elevated priority automatically, thus causing it to skip less, and hopefully not at all.
If you're thinking about going the 64 bit route, keep in mind that driver support for Vista 64 is much more thorough than it was for XP 64. This is really just icing on the cake, however. As Windows 7's release grows closer, keep in mind that developers will want their latest applications to run on it.
Windows 7 is being designed to be as compatible with Vista as possible, so theoretically, most applications that are compatible with Vista should already be compatible with 7. Windows XP support, on the other hand, will be phased out soon and application support may grow sketchy.
These are good things to keep in mind when you are making the choice between XP and Vista. Hopefully you'll embrace Windows Vista, no matter what you may have heard. As the saying goes, "seeing is believing."
Originally Published: April 1, 2009