Yesterday I had the pleasure agony of using Microsoft's newest OS. I was making a house call for a delightful old lady who was having printer problems and I wanted to help get her set up with her brand new laptop purchased not even 2 months ago with Windows Vista pre-installed.
I must preface that my opinion of Windows Vista was influenced by my strong distrust for Best Buy tech support and sales staff. This poor woman, who is no computer whiz by any means, was not properly informed by the sales staff about the minimum hardware requirements for Vista or that her printer would need an updated driver to fully work on Vista. This is very disheartening and it makes me wonder if people at Best Buy care about anything except getting their commission or paycheck. I believe that this whole situation could have been avoided if the sales staff was properly educated about Windows Vista and current compatible hardware. The Geek Squad should have also known better when "fixing" her computer not to leave it in a half-fixed state.
Now when Microsoft took 6 years to release its latest version of it's software, you'd be inclined to assume that it would be so finely tuned that it would work wonderfully on a new computer with a "Designed for Windows Vista" sticker. I mean, Best Buy wouldn't sell hardware that was incompatible, or barely compatible with Vista now would they? Of course they would. First the minimum requirements for Vista Home Basic states that you should have 512 MB of RAM, however, every other version of Vista including Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate recommends a MINIMUM of 1GB. Home Basic may have less background processes running than Home Premium by default, which would explain the lower memory requirement. But honestly when you open one or two of your own applications such as Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Internet Explorer, almost 100% of your available 512MB is quickly used. This is seriously painful because when your physical memory is full, Windows uses a virtual paging file on the much slower hard drive. My biggest pet peeve is slow operation of every day applications and with a new computer, a user should never have to wait over a minute and a half for Microsoft Word to start.
The low memory situation made it painful to operate the PC and even more painful to install and uninstall applications and drivers. I do not wish anybody the absolute agony I experienced while trying to install simple printer drivers and having your mouse pointer freeze for 3 whole minutes. Don't even try to open up Windows' Task Manager to kill any offending processes causing the freeze, because that will take about 4 minutes!
I came to the PC and quickly learned that whoever at Best Buy installed Microsoft Word on her PC never entered in the product key. This poor old lady won't have a working word processor in 30 days. I couldn't find any Word installation CDs. I assume the Best Buy technician threw away the install CD for Office. Go Best Buy!
I must preface that my opinion of Windows Vista was influenced by my strong distrust for Best Buy tech support and sales staff. This poor woman, who is no computer whiz by any means, was not properly informed by the sales staff about the minimum hardware requirements for Vista or that her printer would need an updated driver to fully work on Vista. This is very disheartening and it makes me wonder if people at Best Buy care about anything except getting their commission or paycheck. I believe that this whole situation could have been avoided if the sales staff was properly educated about Windows Vista and current compatible hardware. The Geek Squad should have also known better when "fixing" her computer not to leave it in a half-fixed state.
Now when Microsoft took 6 years to release its latest version of it's software, you'd be inclined to assume that it would be so finely tuned that it would work wonderfully on a new computer with a "Designed for Windows Vista" sticker. I mean, Best Buy wouldn't sell hardware that was incompatible, or barely compatible with Vista now would they? Of course they would. First the minimum requirements for Vista Home Basic states that you should have 512 MB of RAM, however, every other version of Vista including Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate recommends a MINIMUM of 1GB. Home Basic may have less background processes running than Home Premium by default, which would explain the lower memory requirement. But honestly when you open one or two of your own applications such as Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Internet Explorer, almost 100% of your available 512MB is quickly used. This is seriously painful because when your physical memory is full, Windows uses a virtual paging file on the much slower hard drive. My biggest pet peeve is slow operation of every day applications and with a new computer, a user should never have to wait over a minute and a half for Microsoft Word to start.
The low memory situation made it painful to operate the PC and even more painful to install and uninstall applications and drivers. I do not wish anybody the absolute agony I experienced while trying to install simple printer drivers and having your mouse pointer freeze for 3 whole minutes. Don't even try to open up Windows' Task Manager to kill any offending processes causing the freeze, because that will take about 4 minutes!
I came to the PC and quickly learned that whoever at Best Buy installed Microsoft Word on her PC never entered in the product key. This poor old lady won't have a working word processor in 30 days. I couldn't find any Word installation CDs. I assume the Best Buy technician threw away the install CD for Office. Go Best Buy!
Lexmark X1270
Best Buy scored another point in my book when I found out that the printer they recommended isn't compatible with Vista if you use the included drivers. The printer is a multifunction printer, scanner, and copier. It's a Lexmark X1270, which is an entry-level model with a minimal amount of internal memory. So it depends on the computer's memory to make copies. That means it is heavily dependent upon the drivers installed. You can't even activate the external copy buttons if the PC isn't running. Well, you get what you pay for, but that's not my issue here.
When I first tested out this printer, I found that the bundled drivers that were installed by the Best Buy technician only enabled printing functionality; however, copying, scanning, and faxing would not work. I immediately went to Lexmark's website and I downloaded the latest drivers and installed them. To my dismay, this didn't fix the problem. Lexmark's installer detected a previous driver installation and the software stated that it would update the previous drivers. This was reassuring, and from that I assumed, improperly, that the old drivers would be completely removed and cleaned and all the newest functionality would be enabled. After a very long time of frustrating trial and error, I realized that I had to completely remove the old drivers and then re-install the new drivers in order to enable the all-in-one copier, fax, printer functionality. When I went to create the fresh driver install, I followed the on screen instructions from Lexmark and it detected the printer and installed the drivers, but Windows was nice enough to pop up its own "device detected" window and it required that you install the same drivers a second time before you could use the printer. I was able to print a test page in the Lexmark install, but after it exited and after I had wrongly exited the separate Windows driver installer, the printer magically stopped working! I had to go into Device Manager and have Windows re detect the printer again. After that everything magically worked. That was so painless.
Windows Vista is still as cumbersome as previous versions of Windows in my opinion. However it is a lot prettier and they did a good job making it look half as pretty as Mac OS X. If you read other reviews you'll see that they copied a lot of OS X's designs. But I don't blame them for copying good ideas. But besides looking better, I'd rather have an OS that didn't require so much memory just to run basic applications and wasn't so incompatible with legacy (hardware released only a year ago) printers out of the box. Windows will continue to have it's purpose and be the most used OS on the market, but with 6 years of development, I'd have expected more, a lot more.
When I first tested out this printer, I found that the bundled drivers that were installed by the Best Buy technician only enabled printing functionality; however, copying, scanning, and faxing would not work. I immediately went to Lexmark's website and I downloaded the latest drivers and installed them. To my dismay, this didn't fix the problem. Lexmark's installer detected a previous driver installation and the software stated that it would update the previous drivers. This was reassuring, and from that I assumed, improperly, that the old drivers would be completely removed and cleaned and all the newest functionality would be enabled. After a very long time of frustrating trial and error, I realized that I had to completely remove the old drivers and then re-install the new drivers in order to enable the all-in-one copier, fax, printer functionality. When I went to create the fresh driver install, I followed the on screen instructions from Lexmark and it detected the printer and installed the drivers, but Windows was nice enough to pop up its own "device detected" window and it required that you install the same drivers a second time before you could use the printer. I was able to print a test page in the Lexmark install, but after it exited and after I had wrongly exited the separate Windows driver installer, the printer magically stopped working! I had to go into Device Manager and have Windows re detect the printer again. After that everything magically worked. That was so painless.
Windows Vista is still as cumbersome as previous versions of Windows in my opinion. However it is a lot prettier and they did a good job making it look half as pretty as Mac OS X. If you read other reviews you'll see that they copied a lot of OS X's designs. But I don't blame them for copying good ideas. But besides looking better, I'd rather have an OS that didn't require so much memory just to run basic applications and wasn't so incompatible with legacy (hardware released only a year ago) printers out of the box. Windows will continue to have it's purpose and be the most used OS on the market, but with 6 years of development, I'd have expected more, a lot more.
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