After having used xp for quite a while instead of vista and having used Mac OSX on a regular base. I return to Windows Vista to make some free disk space and a partition to install the already famous Windows 7. And that’s when I noticed something, is Windows Vista really that bad? After removing some old junk from my hardrive, the boot went as smooth as a baby’s but.

But I also noticed something irritating in this process. To enable me to make room available for a new 20Gb partition I needed to clean my cache with the system cleaning tool and I noticed that all cache and backups, system restore points, page files, … took an astounding 9,82Gb of my harddrive space! I still have pc’s that only have a 40Gb harddrive, imagine that, 10Gb for the Vista installation + 10Gb cache = 50% of the harddisk we used to work with until three years ago. This is huge.
But is Apple any better with their Mac OSX? No, Windows saves all that information to restore your PC in case anything goes wrong. Mac OSX also has such a feature called Time Machine, Time Machine uses an external harddrive to store the info Windows Vista stores in its cache and guess what? Time Machine copies have the same effectiveness but take about 50Gb more on an external harddisk than Windows Vista does in its cache. So this means that if Apple wouldn’t tell you to buy an external HD to backup everything, files on Mac OSX would take twice the normal diskspace. So definitely a good score for windows, you don’t have to buy an external HD and they discovered a highly space efficient method to make backups.

I was afraid for one more thing, after cleaning so many system files and disabling system restore, the paging files, … would Windows Vista still work? If I did this in Windows XP, I have gotten already a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) or two and in Vista, nothing. It’s obviously more  stable.

What brings me to the next point, Virus Protection. Where my old XP PC’s were constantly infected (nowadays less), Windows Vista hasn’t had one encounter with a virus, I don’t even use an Antivirus but do regular checkups by downloading AV scanning engines and nothing! A clean Vista.

Now UAC, the dreaded new function… Well who told you that Windows Vista sucks? I guess in most cases your PC maker from the local store or a 24/7 downloading uncle. Well what do you do on Windows Vista? Write notes, manage pictures, chat with friends, go online,… How often do you have to install something? PC makers all the time and your uncle every time he installs a new antivirus to try it out or downloads a virus actually. You, not very often, so is it really that hard to enter your password once in a while?

So the conclusion is that Windows Vista is quite fast (if cleaned), is much safer than XP and much more stable as well, all driver and software issues are history and it has an even better backup method than Mac OSX. So is it really that bad? No.