Review: Microsoft Windows Vista operating system

The build-up is over and XP's successor hits the shelves

After nearly six years in development, Windows Vista has finally been released to the masses.

New PCs will ship with it, those with upgrade vouchers will be cautiously cashing them in and the rest may be left wondering just what, if anything, they’re missing out on.

This latest version of Windows promises much: improved reliability and security, a redesigned user interface and the ability to use new hardware technologies.

You can check out the new interface in our Vista image gallery.

As with Windows XP, Vista comes in various editions. There are two versions aimed at home users, one for business and one Ultimate edition that combines all the features of both. Corporate users will also be able to take advantage of the Enterprise Edition, while the Starter Edition is a version available only in what Microsoft calls emerging markets.

This may seem like a confusingly large number of options compared to the now familiar Home and Professional editions of XP, but let’s not forget Media Center Edition and Tablet PC Edition both of which contained special features now folded into the mainstream versions of Windows Vista.

So for most of us there are no more versions of Vista than there are XP, but there is more choice at retail where Media Center and Tablet PC Editions have not previously been available to buy without a PC.

In fact, this would be true were it not for that fact that all versions of Windows Vista except Starter Edition come in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. If you buy the full, retail product you’ll get both versions in the box and you’ll have to pick which one you want to install.

See Vista in action in our video review .

Upgrade and OEM versions come with only either a 32-bit or a 64-bit copy. So you’ll have to buy before you try. You can’t upgrade at a later stage.

The 64-bit editions offer improved performance, memory capacity and system reliability but with some possible compatibility issues due to a current lack of driver and application support.

64-bit Vista also requires all drivers to be digitally signed before they can be installed.

The good news is future drivers signed by Microsoft for use with Windows Vista must be submitted in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, so driver availability should become less of a problem over time.

Curiously, because signed 64-bit XP drivers also work on 64-bit Vista, there are many cases where hardware works now on 64-bit Vista while 32-bit users will have to wait until official Vista drivers are released. Many vendors don’t seem to be in that much of a hurry to release them either. And, as is always the case with new operating systems, there will be plenty of perfectly good hardware that will never be supported under Vista.

The entry-level Home Basic edition omits many of the more obvious new features of Windows Vista: notably the new 3D-accelerated desktop, along with all its transparency and live thumbnail effects.

It’s likely to be a disappointment for those who have been eagerly awaiting a swanky new desktop. It’s also a clever move by Microsoft. While most users would struggle to tell the difference between the Home and Professional editions of XP, Vista Home Basic is conspicuously inferior to its Premium sibling, tempting users into spending more for their operating systems.

A breakdown, by edition, of Vista’s features can be found in our previous Introduction to Vista series. You can also take a closer look at the interface in our Vista image gallery.

If you're thinking of upgrading your current PC to Vista, you can download and run Mic rosoft's Upgrade Advisor - a small application that scans your hardware, advises you as to which version your PC will run, and indentifies those areas that might need upgrading.

Current pricing at retail (inc VAT) is £179.99 for Home Basic, £219.99 for Home Premium, £289.99 for Business and a whopping £369.99 for Ultimate. Of course, Ultimate is the version everyone will want, but it costs more than a new budget PC – expect furious attempts at piracy.

Upgrade pricing is more reasonable at £99.99, £149.99, £189.99 and £249.99 respectively, but by far the cheapest way to get hold of vista is to obtain an OEM version seen on sale at £64.61, £72.84, £91.64 and £129.24. Unfortunately, some vendors such as PC World have quietly dropped OEM editions from their price lists.

We’ve discussed Vista’s new features at length throughout our review of Vista Beta, and and our Vista Background Series.

Probably the most talked about feature is the new flashy Aero desktop, but there’s a lot more to Vista than window dressing.

The new Start menu and integrated desktop search will have a big impact on how you work, while the radically improved search capabilities are designed to cope with sifting through huge amounts of data without slowing desktop responsiveness.

After a few days with Vista, typing a few characters of what you’re looking for into the search box becomes second nature.

If you have a lot of applications installed or a lot of data to sort through, then Vista can find what you’re looking for very quickly.

In terms of performance, it’s true that Vista needs more memory than XP to run smoothly. But, it’s also true that it’s able to make much better use of larger amounts of memory.

This is due mainly to Vista’s Superfetch memory management technology which also paves the way for extras such as Readyboost and Readydrive that take advantage of cheap flash memory to boost system performa nce.

You can read more about Vista's improved performance in our Vista Background Series.

With broadband internet access common in homes across the country, security is a massive issue and one that Microsoft couldn't afford to ignore. The most obvious security upgrade is User Account Control (UAC).

In a nutshell, the idea is to reduce the risk of attack by keeping everything running without administrative access. When it become necessary, the operating system will interrupt what you’re doing and ask you to confirm that administrative privileges should be granted; yes, it’s down to you to know when privileges should be granted.

The fact is, novice users simply won’t know. Even as advanced users of Vista, we’re yet to encounter a single situation where we actually needed to click the Deny button.

You can turn this option off, and we think many users will since it’s incredibly annoying and the whole process is far too slow. It may increase security, but it definitely reduces productivity.
More information on Vista's security is available in our Vista Background Series.

As far as reliability is concerned, we can't say we’ve never seen Vista crash. But hand-in hand with security comes reliability and stricter internal security policies make it harder for processes to misbehave. Meanwhile, the new reliability and performance monitor is streets ahead of anything XP has to offer when it comes to diagnosing system problems and tweaking performance.

Whether or not you should upgrade depends partly on your hardware and whether or not you’re prepared to upgrade it. Windows Vista often means getting hold of new drivers for all your peripherals and components. Many come built in to the operating system, but there are those that don’t and having a piece of kit without a Vista drive means it's unusable.

For example, there are plenty of perfectly good webcams that work just fine under XP but have no drivers for Windows Vista. If you take a look at Logitech’s support pages, as just one example, you will see Vista drivers available for only their newer products – supposedly leaving many existing customers out in the cold.

As it happens, we just downloaded the supposedly incompatible drivers to find they worked even with unsupported products.

Replacing working hardware with newer hardware just for the sake of compatibility is one of the major annoyances when it comes to installing a new operating system – and the story is no different with Windows Vista.

Windows Vista itself is a solid product, with vastly improved reliability and the potential for great performance gains. However, there’s plenty that simply isn’t ready yet.

The promise of exclusive DirectX 10 support is the carrot dangled before PC gamers, with highly impressive video clips circulating the internet. However, gamers who upgrade right now are likely to be disappointed.

Gamers especially are hungry for speed, but at the time of writing neither Nvidia nor ATI have anything more on offer than beta drivers, which have only a subset of the features and performance the cards are capable of. We do, however, expect new driver releases to be announced imminently.

A lack of SLI support and drivers for the latest 8800-based cards form Nvidia makes Vista a non-starter for hardcore gamers who have invested a lot of money in their hardware. More bad news for gamers is that Creative’s EAX simply doesn’t work in Windows Vista, leaving many games working only in plain old stereo mode. Creative Labs is working on a work-around, but it’s not here yet.

Home and business users too may find even the latest hardware is yet to be supported by Vista drivers.

Windows Vista is vastly superior to Windows XP. While there are still some performance issues to be addressed, especially with games, the new architecture ensures far greater reliability, easier technical support and the potential for big performance gains on newer hardware.

The new user interface is not just pretty – it’s also faster and easier to use. Features such as desktop search will change the way you use and organise your data.

Should you upgrade? If your PC is running fine as it is then there’s no reason why you should. At present there’s nothing truly compelling that comes with Vista that means you just have to have it right now.

At the moment it’s one of those things you can easily live without, but try it for a few weeks and chances are you’ll start to gradually change the way you work so that if you go back to XP you’ll suddenly notice just how old and clunky is it compared to Vista.

If you’re keen to upgrade, then provided you have drivers available for all of your hardware and there are no known incompatibilities with your software (Microsoft helps you to check for this), then upgrading now is a viable option.

On the systems we’ve tried, Vista has been more reliable than XP. Microsoft’s extensive beta testing programme seems to have paid off and produced a product that’s remarkably stable on initial release.

See Windows Vista in action in our video review
Video: Bill Gates' Vista launch speech

Further reading:
Vista Background Series
Part One: Overview
Part Two: New take on security
Part Three: Better performance
Part Four: New and improved