30 Ways to Improve Vista

(Photo: Justin Marty)

…or not.

Yesterday I saw a magazine stating in big, bold letters, “30 Ways to Improve Vista.” I scoffed at it because a) I’d given up on trying to improve Vista and b) a magazine article stating so many ways to improve it proves that Vista is a crappy OS. This appears to have been silently approved by Microsoft themselves as you cannot upgrade Vista to Windows 7 – you need to do a clean install. Still, on some level I really wanted to get Vista back to the way it was so I skimmed the article. The article wasn’t helpful for my problems.

So what are my problems with Vista? It’s very slow now. I have a Fujitsu-Siemens V5535 which has 1.8Ghz and around 800mb of RAM, so it’s a very modest laptop. This, combined with the necessity of installing a firewall, antivirus, antispyware, has meant that it has gotten very slow. The computer was quite fast at first without these programmes and moderately quick when I installed them. But gradually over time it has gotten slower, and slower and slower. Currently whenever I boot up, there are a million svchost processes and I’ve no idea which ones to shut down. Plus, if I had to close 20, 30 of these processes every time I used the computer I’d go nuts. Programmes now take ages to load up and if I click them whilst they are loading, the window says “not responding” and the programme takes even longer to load. It is absolutely infuriating.

So I gave Linux a go. I tried the Ubuntu flavour. This was also infuriating as I spent at least 8 hours trying to fix the screen resolution. I told myself to stop, but I kept on going. And going. And going. Then I finally managed to get the bastard working. And what a Inglourious Basterd it is. Once I fixed the resolution from 800×600 to 1280×800, everything else was easy. The fact that it is practically virus and spyware free was a revelation: “I don’t need a virus scanner? Or a firewall?” And it was quick, despite the apparent age of my computer. Previously on Vista, flash videos only worked smoothly if I’d just booted up. Otherwise I had to wait for them to finish buffering before I could watch them properly. It was impossible to watch videos on BBC iplayer. So imagine my surprise when my computer was already scorchingly hot but it could run the iplayer videos. With ease. I think I fell in love.

So anyone who’s reading this is having problems with Vista, give Linux a go. You have to do a bit of work to get it going but the results are completely worth it.