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Windows Vista doesn't deserve bad reputation
March 19, 2007
By James Kosterman

As a computer science senior, I was very excited to find out I was entitled to a free copy of Windows Vista, Microsoft's new operating system (OS), through the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Although I'd heard of many issues of incompatibilities between Vista and software I use, as well as crashes during regular use, I shamelessly installed the software behemoth's prettiest OS to date. I set up my installation of Vista on a portion of my hard drive separate from my Windows XP installation because I was afraid of running into problems getting schoolwork done or using entertainment software such as digital media and PC games.

So, now I have both XP and Vista on my machine, and I can always revert to XP if something doesn't work right in Vista. But, you know what? I have really enjoyed using Vista. Now that it's been out and patched or updated for more than a month and a half, I haven't run into many of the initial problems reported.

I am also quite impressed with the Windows Aero glass-effect interface, which makes the edges of windows translucent. However, the effect takes up a fairly large amount of memory and processing power, and may not be reasonably used on computers with older hardware.