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Windows Vista Articles >> Buyer beware Windows Vista: XP-Successor has its 2 gotchas!

Only a handful of days until Vista launches. W-Tweaks has two reasons to carefully evaluate while jumping on the Vista train! By Sandro Villinger

I don’t want this to sound a like a Microsoft hymn but I like Windows Vista very much and it would be a tough choice to go back to Windows XP. However, if you’re a potential buyer of the shiny new operating system I do have two points that might hold you back from updating just now...

Laptop users watch out: Vista drains batteries like a madman!
Last summer I acquired this nice Media Center laptop from Acer (the Acer Aspire 9504) with a bright 17” monitor, 2 Ghz Intel Centrino, 2 GB of RAM and a fast hard disk (fast for a laptop, that is). I am using it as a sweet test machine for Windows Vista which runs pretty smooth but one thing that I really hate about the new Microsoft OS is that it definitely does not try much to save battery power when compared to Windows XP.

100% of battery power - rare sight with Windows Vista. I unplugged the power just before I started writing this article - let’s see how far Vista takes me

50 minutes later: Over 50% of the battery life is gone! Do you want that to happen on an airplane? Or in a meeting? Or in an internet cafe? Not me...

Even if I’m on the airplane and disable EVERY piece of battery draining hardware (Bluetooth, WLAN, LAN, USB, Firewire) and crank down the brightness to the absolute minimum the laptop battery runs dry after 1 1/2 to 2 hours and that is barely enough for watching a movie on DVD. With Windows XP the laptop lives at least 2 1/2 hours and sometimes even three (if I just watch a movie and don’t do anything else). I took the time and compared the battery life usage with Windows Vista and Windows XP in detail:

On my second laptop (Acer Ferrari 1000) I get pretty much the same results. Vista sucks the battery dry 30-40% faster than Windows XP on my machines. Why? There is no real clue - except that when I disable Windows Aero Glass I get approx. 15-20% more battery life out of the machine. I am also noticing that Vista is accessing the hard disk much more heavily than Windows XP which is probably due to the SuperFetch feature that’s busy populating the memory with useful information. However, Microsoft made NO effort to give the user some hints about the situation and how to safe battery life with Windows Vista.

Aero Glass eats up approx. 20% of battery life - but does everyone of the audience actually knows this?

The driver situation is still not perfect
Perhaps I am a couple of days too early with this accusation but I am not happy with the overall driver situation. Some examples:

• Creative Labs X-Fi: I truly believe that the X-Fi is one of the best sound cards out there and I have never heard that kind of crystal clear quality. However, my sound system has a subwoofer that can only be adressed by using the “Activate bass by-pass” feature in the THX control panel of the Creative X-Fi software suite. And since all these Creative applications (THX control panel, diagnose, speaker set up etc.) do not work at all with Windows Vista I can listen to my music without the subwoofer - and that sounds like the speaker I had back when Windows 95 came out. The general functionality of this (very) good sound card is crippled. And that is not the fault of Microsoft, it’s the fault of Creative - they are throwing out new X-Fi drivers every couple of weeks now but they are not communicating WHEN all these applications will work. So I have absolutely no fun listening to music or play around with Media Center because the overall sound quality is so poor.
• GeForce 8800 GTX and gaming: To make a long story short - Gaming under Vista is so slow. I believe I have the fastest consumer video card that is available right now and (yes) I am using the latest drivers but Windows XP can run EVERY game 20-50% faster than Windows Vista. I mean even the “not-so-new-anymore” Age of Empires III starts to stutter while displaying more than 30-40 units on the screen.
• WLAN: I have three different wireless adapters on my laptop and on my main test machine. The wireless connection works all right but it is an absolute pain to wait for the network to be ready. So after a reboot I have to wait 20-30 seconds until Vista gives me the option to select different wireless networks. If I right-click on the network button in the lower right corner of the task bar it sometimes takes 5-6 seconds to display the context menu - well, and sometimes this menu is totally empty. So I have to wait, wait and wait until I am finally able to connect. Not something I would consider a major Gotcha but it gets on your nerves fast!
• Glitch-free video and audio: I am not sure this is a driver issue but I suspect it might be one that has an impact on both ATI and nVidia powered machines. Remember when Microsoft proudly touted the “glitch-free video and audio” back in 2005? They were showing off Vista running 8-10 videos simultaneously without one dropped frame - every single video ran very smooth. Well, today the situation changed: Windows Vista has a hard time running even one video smooth while doing something else. Especially when I try to copy files (even small 20 MB files for examples) the video starts to stutter...That’s just poor! This happens with lots of operations that rely heavily on the CPU - but even if I increase the process priority of Windows Media Player to “High” the stuttering appears. That even happens on Core 2 Duo machines...

Copying and watching a movie? Too much for Vista on all of my machines!

My advice for gamers, multimedia enthusiasts and mobile workers: Be careful because you might be getting less performance, less sound quality and less battery life while working with Windows Vista in the first weeks (or months?) until the driver situation is solved...